-_— 



CHRISTIANITY 
VINDICATED 
BY ITS ENEMIES 






DANIEL DORCHESTER 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
p— u 

Chap^-.lJ/ Copyright No. 

Shelf* JJ-J. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




\Jau^Jt DovckjL^CT 



CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED 
BY ITS ENEMIES 



"Ebefr rocfc is not as our t&ock, even our enemies tbemsetves 
being juD<jes."— Deut. xxxii, 31 



/ 



By DANIEL DORCHESTER, D.D. 




NEW YORK: HUNT & EAT 
CINCINNATI : CRANSTON & CURTS 



ON +>* 



' ' \ 






Copyright by 

HUNT & EATON, 

1896. 



The Library 
of Congress 

washington 



Composition, electrotyping, 

printing, and binding by 

Hunt & Eaton, 

150 Fifth Ave., New York. 



PREFACE, 



It is the thought and hope of the author 
that this little book, presenting a subject of 
vast scope and importance in a very condensed 
form, will meet a popular demand and prove 
helpful to many minds, especially the young, 
who are often brought in contact with various 
forms of skepticism. The argument of the 
book being strongly cumulative, the last chap- 
ters should be closely studied. 

Daniel Dorchester. 

Melrose, Mass., January i, 1896. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGB 

Introduction 7 

I. God and Immortality 11 

II. Genuine Historic Basis of Christianity 35 

III. The Transcendent Character of Christian- 

ity as a Religious System 61 

IV. The Divinity of Christianity 79 

V. Four Leading Vital Doctrines 95 

VI. The Innermost Central Column of the Chris- 
tian System Vindicated by its Enemies. . 133 

VII. Inferences 177 

Index 181 



INTRODUCTION 



Whether infidelity is of the head or of the 
heart is a much-mooted question. Some con- 
tend it is of the head — that men are made 
skeptics by real difficulties inhering in the sys- 
tem of Christianity, or by habits of specula- 
tion which involve them in imaginary difficul- 
ties. Others think infidelity springs out of the 
heart, from the passions, which cannot endure 
the restraints and rebukes of the Holy Scrip- 
tures, but clamor for undisturbed indulgence — 
that men profess to be infidels because they 
wish the Christian religion untrue, rather than 
because they believe it is untrue. 

There is doubtless some truth in both of 
these views. Infidelity is both of the head and 
of the heart. £)ften largely speculative, never- 
theless its mainspring is doubtless a perversity 
in human nature — its alienation from God. 

But men possess moral natures, with moral 
intuitions, under the influence of which they 
sometimes utter better views than they have 
at other times expressed, betraying the real 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

convictions of their hearts. In some of these 
better moods doubters of every class have 
made the most remarkable acknowledgments 
in favor of the Christian religion, which, in the 
presence of their associates in unbelief, they 
had ridiculed and denounced. 

It is a well-attested truth that, sooner or 
later, all that is in a man's heart will find an 
outward expression. It only requires a change 
of influences, circumstances, or motives to 
bring out all that is in man. In the more 
candid and reflective moments, the real reli- 
gious belief finds utterance. What is then said 
is of far greater value than what is spoken in 
moments of hilarity, or when puzzled by spec- 
ulation, or flattered by applause, or maddened 
by controversy. 

Acknowledgments made in these better 
moods go far to corroborate the truth of the 
Christian religion, and show how illusory and 
vain are the hopes of unbelievers ; while Chris- 
tianity stands like a rock, unmoved in every 
trial, the ultimate sure refuge of all — even of 
its enemies. The motto, therefore, of this dis- 
cussion is, " Their rock is not as our Rock, 
even our enemies themselves being judges. " 

Skeptics, in their worst moods, have said so 
much against Christianity that it is only fair 
to see what they have said in their better 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

moods in favor of the Christian religion. Cer- 
tainly what they have said in these better 
conditions of mind must be of the greatest 
value. Those who have never examined this 
phase will be surprised to find how far these 
better utterances will go toward vindicating 
Christianity. The method of argument, then, 
in this book will be somewhat novel. 

The large quantities of arguments and facts 
which might be adduced from the Christian 
side of the case will be carefully avoided. All 
the proofs and testimonies used shall be fur- 
nished by the enemies of Christianity, or at 
least by men standing outside of it and un- 
committed to it. Passing over upon the 
ground occupied by our adversaries, we pro- 
pose, out of the admissions they have made 
in their more candid moods, to gather mate- 
rials with which to vindicate Christianity. 

Virgil, in one of his beautiful Eclogues (iv, 
verse 58), speaking of a contest for preeminence 
in song, says : 

" Should Pan^contend with me, were even 
Arcadia judge, Pan would acknowledge himself 
to be vanquished, Arcadia herself being judge." 

So, in this discussion, skeptics and men of 
the world, standing outside of Christianity, 
shall be the judges, and their constrained 
acknowledgments shall decide the question. 



<3o£> anfc f mmortalfts. 



CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED BY ITS 
ENEMIES. 



CHAPTER I. 

GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 

Twenty-five years ago the trend of scien- 
tific thought in relation to the questions of 
God and immortality was toward materialism. 
That there has been a change since that time 
is a common confession. 

Let us look at acknowledgments made by 
scientific skeptics in both of these periods 
touching these great questions. 

In the former period it was commonly de- 
clared that these were " open questions/' mat- 
ters of grave uncertainty, and, if ever deter- 
mined, it must be done by purely scientific 
methods, by processes of argument grounded 
in irrefragable axioms. 

Mr. F. E. Abbot, of Cambridge, Mass., at 
one time editor of The Index, was an accepted 
representative of the scientific school of think- 
ers. He was a gentleman of high culture, per- 



14 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

sonally very estimable, and of high character. 
In a course of lectures by prominent men in 
Horticultural Hall, Boston, in 1872, he boldly 
undertook the task of determining the ques- 
tions of God and immortality. He first showed 
to his own satisfaction the grave defects of the 
intuitional school of thought. He declared its 
methods as simply a series of assumptions and 
self-asseverations, " a Barmecide feast," utterly 
unscientific, and consequently to be set aside 
in this age of pure scientific investigation. 

He then said, * " The eyes of mankind are 
riveted with infinite yearning upon the youth- 
ful figure of Science," and inquired, " What, 
then, is the real attitude of Science toward the 
ideas of God and immortality? " 

We flatter ourselves that now we shall tread 
on sure foundations, something better than 
" empty asseverations/ ' We shall no longer 
" chew the air and go away famishing. Science 
is to satisfy the hungry soul of humanity. 
Hope," he says, " has been long deferred, and 
under the inspiration of flattering promises 
our expectations are high. Millions hang 
breathless upon his most trivial word." 

But how great is to be our disappointment ! 
We are ready and waiting to be led, under 

* I quote from Mr. Abbot's own published account of his 
lecture. 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 15 

skillful guidance, to inspect the strongholds of 
the scientific school of doubters, the unbeliev- 
ers expounding their own system. But what 
do we meet? At the very outset we have a 
weak confession, and others soon follow : 

Confession I. " It must be confessed, I think, that 
this stripling, Science, lets fall much nonsense. He is 
still, in the one pungent phrase of the Country Parson, 
" in the vealy stage," somewhat elated by the attention 
he receives, somewhat given to flippant and pert speech, 
somewhat too eager to show his disrespect for venerable 
ideas, whose depth he has by no means fathomed. 
Science is, nevertheless, destined to be the world's true 
Messiah ; but at present he is bent on sowing his wild 
oats to his heart's content." 

So then, in the year of the world, according 
to the short chronology of Usher, 5900, and 
according to the longer chronology of Mr. J. 
Vela Blake,* 1 1,001,830, Science is " youthful," 
" in the vealy stage," "flippant," "pert," and 
" sowing his wild oats." Nevertheless, we are 
told that in such frisky hands are held the 
scales in which are to be weighed our faith in 
God and immortality. 

Confession II. Mr. Abbot proceeds : " Nothing can 
be regarded as the assured and ultimate word of science, 
on any subject, so long as the scientific world are divided 
in opinion concerning it ; and even when the scientific 

* Radical, January, 1872. 



l6 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

world are agreed it by no means follows that new dis- 
coveries may not require new modifications of accepted 
opinion ; for science is ever increasing, without any lim- 
its which can be assigned." 

Under the dispensation of science, then, the 
answer to these momentous questions is still 
delayed and indefinitely postponed. 

Confession III. He says : " The present attitude of 
science toward the ideas of God and immortality is that 
of pure indifference. These questions are daily ignored 
by science and impatiently thrust aside, as interlopers in 
the province of scientific research. Scientific men turn 
their backs on religion with manifest irritability, because 
science is now busy with other cares, laying the foun- 
dations of a great future edifice." 

Having been told that the two systems of 
revelation, the written and the intuitional, 
have failed, that the day of authority and self- 
asseveration have passed, and that Science is 
now our only hope, we respectfully entered 
her apartments, introduced our inquiries, ac- 
cepted her method of induction and deduction, 
but we were thrust aside as " interlopers " and 
superciliously bowed out of iier presence with 
the plain assertion that she is now engrossed 
with other matters. We press the inquiry, 
What, then, can humanity do ? 

Confession IV. " A school of thinkers is gradu- 
ally forming, devoted to the investigation of the highest 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 1 7 

problems. Within a few years such phrases as " the 
scientific study of theology," " the science of religion," 
etc., have become somewhat familiar to the public ear. 
What is called " comparative religion "... is claim- 
ing a fitting place in the sisterhood of sciences. Scholars 
of the highest eminence have pursued and are pursuing 
these investigations in the most strictly scientific spirit. 
. . . Their labors, however, are as yet bestowed mainly 
upon the more superficial phenomena. . . . They pro- 
pose to extend their studies to the ideas of God, of im- 
mortality, of duty, embracing everything that has passed 
under the name of religion, and subjecting it to the 
severest tests." 

And so, after these thousands of years, it is 
confessed that science is yet in its infancy. A 
few men have just gone into the forest to 
select timber for the edifice, and the process 
must be slow, for only the choicest material 
will answer. Only wait a few thousand years 
more; that will not belong; and then perhaps 
our patience will be rewarded, and possibly we 
may know something. 

Confession V. Again he speaks : " The plain fact 
is this : scientific men, no less than men of the world, are 
divided in opinion on the profound questions of God 
and immortality. . . . It is time to look facts squarely in 
the face, and drop all euphemistic disguises, as to their 
purport. The progress of physical science has called the 
faith of mankind in God and immortality into grave and 
most painful doubt. This is the naked, unvarnished 
truth." 



1 8 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

If this is so, then, according to these confes- 
sions, under the guidance of science humanity 
must prosecute her inquiries with prospects in- 
creasingly dubious. 

Confession VI. Mr. Abbot says : " Doubt is born 
of physical science ; " " but physical science is not all ; the 
appeal is to universal science. By the verdict of universal 
science we must abide ; bring the case before the court." 

We may accept Mr. Abbot's method, that 
we may see what can be done by his own proc- 
esses. Let the jury then be impaneled. Let 
the witnesses be produced, sworn, and closely 
questioned. But let us pause a moment before 
we proceed. That we may make due provi- 
sion let us know whether the case will be long 
or short. Let us see. What a cloud of wit- 
nesses, according to Mr. Abbot, universal sci- 
ence proposes to summon ! What an array, 
too, of the most acute counselors ! Evidently 
the case will be very protracted. Nothing 
less than a succession of judges, longer than the 
lists of the Pharaohs or the dynasties of the 
Chinese kings will suffice. 

What is the bill, as drawn up by this dis- 
tinguished advocate of the scientific method ? 
He says that universal science must demon- 
strate the following points : 

I. "A universal causative power/' that is, 
throughout the whole realm of nature. 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 19 

2. " The intelligible unity of nature, in all 
her departments, " animate and inanimate, 
vegetable and mineral, seas, skies, life, death, 
air, vapors, gases, storms, tornadoes, diseases, 
famines, pestilences, etc. 

3. " The creative ideas in organic develop- 
ment, ,, beyond the questionings of Darwin, 
Huxley, and their fellows. 

4. "The moral sentiment in man, the reli- 
gious affections, the spiritual instincts, sensi- 
bilities, and aspirations, the ideal hopes and 
struggles," must all be carefully analyzed among 
all nations and tribes and in different ages of 
the world. 

5. " The conscious freedom of the human 
soul must be considered as a part of nature," 
and it must be demonstrated under the cross- 
examination of fatalism, pantheism, and ma- 
terialism, with Mill, Spencer, Emerson, and their 
successors as attorneys. 

6. " The critical study of all the sacred writ- 
ings and the history and institutions of all the 
great religions of the world, 

7. " Extending and enlarging the common 
conception of experience, so that it shall take 
in the entirety of human consciousness, as well 
as the mere contact of his consciousness with 
the outer world, and thus including whatever 
of mental phenomena the word intuition really 



20 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

stands for/* and at the same time discriminat- 
ing against "transcendental affirmatives outside 
of possible experience," etc. 

8. And science must also invade " the fields 
which have hitherto been surrendered to the 
Church, as if beyond its own proper province," 
and it must " insist that all the facts of con- 
sciousness shall be included in the universal 
realm of science, and regarded as truly the 
phenomena for scientific study, as the relations 
of number and quantity, the process of chemical 
combination, the fungoid origin of cholera, the 
origin of species, or the bright and dark lines 
in the solar and stellar spectra." 

These are the principal points in the bill. 

Four rules of law are laid down to be ob- 
served in the investigation : 

1. "The real facts are to be scientifically 
studied and interpreted, and the solution must 
be approached by one universal method, the 
union of induction and deduction, resting on a 
basis of observed facts and leading to veritable 
results." 

2. He allows " the liberty to frame provi- 
sional scientific hypotheses, such as the influ- 
ence of dust on disease, the phenomena of fer- 
tilization, the results of deep-sea dredgings, the 
photosphere, the cosmosphere, and the corona 
of the sun." 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 21 

3. We are told that " nothing will serve as 
foundation for a truly universal science but the 
totality of all phenomena." 

4. " Each individual must work out for him- 
self his private convictions, in the pure spirit of 
truth, in unflinching adherence to the laws of 
thought," and then, after each individual of the 
race shall have reached his conclusions, " the 
united concurring opinion of ' mankind ' is to 
be pronounced as the final verdict." 

Such is the case before the court. The case 
has been called, the law has been laid down. 
It is exceedingly broad. The witnesses are 
legion. Let the trial proceed. 

But at the outset we encounter practical 
difficulties, for who will live long enough to 
gather all the testimony and to form the judg- 
ment? 

We cannot afford to lose time in inaction. 
The case must be opened and pushed as rapidly 
as possible. 

But at once we are met by another confession: 

Confession VII. Mr. Abbot says : " Gentlemen, I 
think it should be mentioned at the outset that there is 
a large number of witnesses which are not yet ready to 
testify. 

" Sociology, psychology, ethics, and the allied branches 
are scarcely capable as yet of a scientific treatment. Still 
less can we expect that branches higher still, involving 
the intricate questions of philosophy, can be thus treated. 



22 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

The data for the full solution of the higher problems of 
thought are not yet gathered." At some indefinite period, 
" far in the future," they may be ready to give their testi- 
mony. 

In presenting these confessions I have done 
no injustice to the scientific school of skeptics. 
I have carefully quoted them from one of their 
leading advocates, and everything has been fair 
on my part. 

Mr. Abbot has made these confessions with 
his characteristic frankness, shrinking from no 
position or avowal to which his logic leads him. 
He aimed to give the purely scientific method 
of deciding these great questions, and there can 
be no other purely scientific processes. In the 
nature of the case such investigation must be 
both inductive and deductive, and embrace in 
its scope all phenomena of mind and of nature. 
Mr. Abbot himself seemed embarrassed with 
these difficulties, and appropriately said : " You 
ask, not without reason, Must we then wait for 
untold years before the vast questions of God 
and immortality, on which the happiness of the 
human race depends, can be answered ? Are 
we indeed doomed, as individual men and 
women, to live and die in this darkness? " 

His reply is another confession : 

Confession VIII. He says : " Friends, I must frankly 
meet this inquiry. Science alone must give, in his own 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 23 

time, the final reply to our anxious and earnest question. 
Neither my reply nor the reply of any other man should 
be thrust forward as the sure verdict of the future. But 
for myself, having studied as earnestly as I could these 
momentous problems, I have become convinced that the 
final answer of science will but deepen, fortify, and exalt 
our human faith in God as an intelligent, self-conscious 
Being, infinitely more tender and benign than our loftiest 
conceptions of human love ; and I trust it will strengthen 
and purify and elevate our human hope of immortality 
as continued individual existence. We must each of 
us work out for ourselves our private convictions, in the 
pure spirit of truth and in unflinching adherence to 
the great laws of thought. Science must, at last, an- 
swer for the whole race ; we must meanwhile answer for 
ourselves." 

THE LATER PHASES. 

Since Mr. Abbot discoursed, as we have 
seen, there has been a very marked change. 
It is a common confession among eminent 
men of science that philosophic thought has 
a new trend, and that materialism is hopelessly 
behind the age. Professor John Fiske * says : 
" The moment the first trace of conscious intel- 
ligence is introduced we have a set of phenom- 
ena which materialism can in nowise account 
for. . . . Materialism is more and more dis- 
credited by the dominant philosophy of our 
time, and it will no doubt continue to be more 

* North American Reviezv, March, 1882. 



24 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

and more discredited with each future advance 
in philosophic speculation." 

There have been marked reverse tendencies, 
largely from out of the camp of free thought, 
confirming and establishing the old truths. 
It is a significant fact, cited by Kuntz, that 
Kant's philosophy " became a schoolmaster, 
leading to Christ in manifold ways." The 
ideas of God, freedom, and immortality Kant 
acknowledged as " postulates of the practical 
reason," and the basis of all religion whose 
contents are above the moral law. 

Nor is Kant the only philosopher whose 
writings have served the cause of faith. The 
best forms of modern philosophy have modi- 
fied radical doubt and caused the lines of 
true speculation to converge toward the lines 
of Christian truth. It is remarkable how much 
less atheism and pantheism exist than for- 
merly. Even Hartmann leans strongly toward 
theism, though not avowing it, for he speaks 
of " One Absolute Subject," " One Identical 
Subject." The god of scientific theism — a 
force, personal or impersonal, behind natural 
phenomena — is, indeed, not such a being as the 
Christian theist worships ; but such a recogni- 
tion of Deity is far in advance of the blank 
atheism and the atheistic theory of chance 
current a century ago. 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 2$ 

" I am no atheist, " protested Comte two 
years before his death ; my attitude is that of 
belief; if not I should have no right to treat 
of such matters. If you will have a theory of 
existence, an Intelligent Will is the best you 
can have." Kant* said: "The great whole 
would sink into an abyss of nothing if we did 
not admit of something originally and inde- 
pendently external to this infinite contingent, 
and as the cause of its origin.' ' Herbert 
Spencer, professedly discarding the usually 
accepted idea of God, sometimes falls back 
upon anthropomorphic conceptions of Deity, 
and speaks of the " Incomprehensible Exist- 
ence/' the " Unknown Cause," the " Incon- 
ceivable Greatness." But his " Unknowable " 
is " one, not many ; the real as opposed to the 
apparent ; a power and a fundamental cause ; 
persistent and unchangeable ; omnipresent in 
space and eternal in time." How significant 
and rich such affirmations ! Professor Tyndall f 
said : " The idea of a creative power is as 
necessary to the production of a single original 
form as to that of a multitude." 

As to the doctrine of immortality, the latest 
revelations of physical and psychological sci- 
ence have augmented the great volume of tes- 
timony in its favor. The greatest names in 
* First Principles, p. 96. f Belfast address. 



26 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

modern philosophy, Bacon, Descartes, Leib- 
nitz, Locke, Kant, Hamilton, and even Hart- 
mann, are subscribed in its support. Mr. R. W. 
Emerson, in 1872, in a lecture in Music Hall, 
Boston, expressed grave doubts in regard to 
immortality, but subsequently he declared 
himself more clearly and confidently in its 
favor. 

I give two very remarkable recent testimonies 
of great weight. The first is from the Popular 
Science Monthly, in 1894, from the Marquis of 
Salisbury, on accepting the presidency of the 
British Association for the Advancement of 
Science. He makes his own the following 
quotation from Lord Kelvin, whom he called 
" the greatest living master of natural science 
among Englishmen." He said : 

" I feel profoundly convinced that the argu- 
ment of design has been greatly too much lost 
sight of in recent zoological speculations. Over- 
poweringly strong proofs of intelligent and be- 
nevolent design lie around us ; and if ever per- 
plexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, 
turn us away from them for a time, they come 
back upon us with irresistible force, showing to 
us through nature the influence of a free will, 
and teaching us that all living things depend 
on one everlasting Creator and Ruler." 

The other eminent testimony dates July, 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 2J 

1895, and was thus reported in the Congrega- 
tionalisi: 

" Professor John Fiske, speaking at the Green- 
acre Conference, reiterated those conclusive 
arguments, which he has recently published, 
for holding a theory of evolution which postu- 
lates God and religion. He said that when 
a certain type of evolutionists declare that 
science has destroyed religion they are simply 
basing their opinion more upon the old anti- 
religious sentiment of the eighteenth century 
than upon any real scientific reasoning. Pro- 
fessor Fiske holds that religion, from its earliest 
and crudest forms to its most refined, contains 
three essential elements : first, belief in God as 
in some way either explicable or inexplicable, 
and yet analogous to man ; secondly, belief in 
an unseen world in which personality continues 
after death ; thirdly, belief in an inseparable 
connection between the unseen world and the 
moral law ; and he has no patience with Mr. 
Frederick Harrison's idea that a hope of sur- 
vival in the grateful remembrance of one's 
fellow-creatures will ever take the place of a 
belief in personal immortality. He holds that, 
coeval with the genesis of humanity and the 
ethical sense, the religious sense also began to 
appear ; and to those who accept this, but be- 
lieve that such an outreaching of humanity to 



28 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

the unseen establishes a relation in which the 
subjective term is real and the objective term 
is imaginary, Professor Fiske replies that if so 
it is something without precedent in the proc- 
ess of evolution ; it is an isolated fact in the 
universe, and this is enough to condemn the 
supposition, for there are no isolated facts in 
the universe, or, as Professor Fiske puts it, 
' The whole analogy of evolution bears us with 
resistless momentum to the conclusion that the 
religious cravings of mankind are correlated 
with an unseen world that really exists, and in 
which the process of ethical evolution is to find 
its fullest fruition and consummation/ 

" These essential elements of religion, as Pro- 
fessor Fiske states them, are the primary prin- 
ciples of the Bible, which to the belief in God 
presents the moral law as from him, and to the 
belief in an inseparable connection between the 
unseen world and the moral law presents the 
sacrifice of Jesus Christ as the means of restora- 
tion to fellowship with God of those who have 
broken the moral law and, therefore, their con- 
nection with the unseen world. The theory of 
evolution is constantly undergoing changes, 
though in some form it is steadily gaining 
ground among all classes of religious students. 
It is constantly approaching toward harmony 
with biblical teachings. As Dr. Fiske expounds 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 29 

it, it seems to make the fact of a revelation 
from God not only possible but necessary. If, 
to these fundamental beliefs which he names, 
evolution points to objective realities, they 
must disclose themselves to the human soul 
reaching out after them. God cannot be silent 
to those who believe in and love him. The 
movement of evolution is the activity of the 
Father of mankind. The Bible is the record of 
his thought finding expression in human his- 
tory and experience, and of his love and mercy 
finding expression in the incarnation, death, 
and resurrection of his only begotten Son." 

Lamartine {Bien Publique) eloquently voiced 
some very striking facts which are pertinent 
here : 

" I know — I sigh when I think of it — that 
hitherto the French people have been the 
least religious of all the nations of Europe. Is 
it because the idea of God — which arises from 
all the evidences of nature, and from the depths 
of reflection, being the profoundest and weight- 
iest idea of which human intelligence is capa- 
ble — and the French mind being the most 
rapid, but the most superficial, the lightest, 
the most unreflective of all European races — 
this mind has not the force and severity neces- 
sary to carry far and long the greatest concep- 
tion of the human understanding? 



30 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

" Is it because our governments have always 
taken upon themselves to think for us, to be- 
lieve for us, and to pray for us? Is it because 
we are and have been a military people, a sol- 
dier nation, led by kings, heroes, ambitious 
men, from battlefield to battlefield, making 
conquests and never keeping them, ravaging, 
dazzling, charming, and corrupting Europe, 
and bringing home the manners, vices, bravery, 
lightness, and impiety of the camp to the fire- 
side of the people? 

" I know not ; but certain it is that the na- 
tion has an immense progress to make in seri- 
ous thought if she wishes to remain free. If 
we look at the characters, compared as regards 
religious sentiment, of the great nations of 
Europe, America, even Asia, the advantage is 
not for us. The great men of other countries 
live and die on the scene of history, looking up 
to heaven ; our great men appear to live and die, 
forgetting completely the only idea for which 
it is worth living and dying — they live and die 
looking at the spectator, or, at most, at posterity. 

" Open the history of America, the history of 
England, and the history of France ; read the 
great lives, the great deaths, the great martyr- 
doms, the great words at the hour when the 
ruling thought of life reveals itself in the last 
words of the dying, and compare. 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 3 I 

" Washington and Franklin fought, spoke, 
suffered, ascended, and descended in their 
political life of popularity, in the ingratitude 
of glory, in the contempt of their fellow-citi- 
zens — always in the name of God, for whom 
they acted ; and the liberator of America died 
confiding to God the liberty of the people and 
his own soul. 

"Sidney, the noble martyr of a patriotism, 
guilty of nothing but impatience, and who 
died to expiate his country's dream of liberty, 
said to his jailer, ' I rejoice that I die innocent 
toward the king, but a victim, resigned to the 
King on high, to whom all life is due/ 

" The republicans of Cromwell only sought 
the way of God, even in the blood of battles. 
Their politics were their faith, their reign a 
prayer, their death a psalm. One hears, sees, 
feels, that God was in all the movements of 
these great people. 

"But cross the sea, traverse La Manche, come 
to our time, open our annals, and listen to the 
last words of the great political actors of the 
drama of our liberty. One would think that 
God was eclipsed from the soul, that his name 
was unknown in the language. History will 
have the air of an atheist when she recounts 
to posterity these annihilations, rather than 
deaths, of celebrated men in the greatest year 



32 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

of France ! The victims only have a God ; the 
tribunes and lictors have none. 

" Look at Mirabeau on the bed of death — 
6 Crown me with flowers,' said he ; ' intoxicate 
me with perfumes. Let me die to the sound 
of delicious music/ Not a word of God, or 
of his soul. Sensual philosopher, he desired 
only supreme sensualism, a last voluptuous- 
ness in his agony. Contemplate Madame Ro- 
land, the strong-hearted woman of the Rev- 
olution, on the cart that conveyed her to 
death. She looked contemptuously on the 
besotted people who killed their prophets 
and sibyls. Not a glance toward heaven ! 
Only one word for the earth she was quitting 
— <0 Liberty!' 

"Approach the dungeon door of the Giron- 
dins. Their last night is a banquet ; the only 
hymn the Marseillaise ! 

"Follow Camille Desmoulins to his execution. 
A cool and indecent pleasantry at the trial, and 
a long imprecation on the road to the guillo- 
tine, were the last two thoughts of this dying 
man on his way to the last tribunal. 

" Hear Danton on the platform of the scaffold, 
at the distance of a line from God and eternity : 
* I have had a good time of it ; let me go to 
sleep.' Then to the executioner: 'You will 
show my head to the people — it is worth the 



GOD AND IMMORTALITY. 33 

trouble ! ' His faith, annihilation ; his last 
sigh, vanity. Behold the Frenchmen of this 
latter age ! 

" What must one think of the religious senti- 
ment of a free people whose great figures seem 
thus to march in procession to annihilation, and 
to whom that terrible minister — death — itself, 
recalls neither the threatenings nor promises of 
God. 

" The republic of these men, without a God ? 
has quickly been stranded. The liberty, won 
by so much heroism and so much genius, has 
not found in France a conscience to shelter it, 
a God to avenge it, a people to defend it 
against that atheism which has been called 
glory. All ended in a soldier and some 
apostate republicans travestied into courtiers. 
An atheistic republicanism cannot be heroic. 
When you terrify it, it bends ; when you would 
buy it, it sells itself. It would be very foolish 
to immolate itself. Who would take any heed ? 
The people ungrateful, and God nonexistent. 
So finish atheistic revolutions ! " 



(Benufne Historic Basis of Christianity. 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 37 



CHAPTER II. 

GENUINE HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Let us imagine ourselves visitors to this 
earth from some distant planet. Approaching 
in swift flight, at early dawn, we meet a dark 
spirit hovering on poised wing. Through the 
mists of the morning we feebly discern a 
stately spire, as of some goodly temple point- 
ing heavenward, and ask the strange spirit 
what it is. He replies, " It is only a myth — 
an illusion. " As we continue to gaze, turrets, 
towers, and battlements loom up through the 
departing mists. "See," we exclaim, "it 
must be more than a myth." " Nay," he 
replies, " it is only an optical illusion or a sub 
jective vision." 

While we look the orb of day rises higher 
in the heavens, pouring down his effulgence 
upon the earth. The mists, gathering up 
their dripping skirts, flee away, revealing a 
temple of magnificent dimensions securely 
founded upon a rock. 

Christianity has met with similar treatment 
— has been represented as mythical, illusory, 



38 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

unworthy of credence as to historic origin, a 
noxious delusion as to its peculiar claims, a 
failure as to its avowed purposes, a compound 
of human superstition and credulity unworthy 
of rational acceptance. 

Other aspects of the questions at issue be- 
tween the Church and modern skepticism will 
be subsequently considered. The topic now 
under consideration comes naturally first in 
order, for if Christianity is without a veritable 
historic basis we need not trouble ourselves 
further ; but if it has such a basis it challenges 
attention and further inquiry. 

Let it not be presumed, however, that this 
question depends solely upon what our adver- 
saries say. By no means. A vast amount of 
positive evidence can be adduced. But we 
propose to show that the historic basis of 
Christianity can be vindicated by the admis- 
sions of its enemies. Attention is invited to 
several classes of concessions. 

I. The admissions of eminent rationalists as 
to the validity of the testimonies of three promi- 
nent fathers of the early Church. 

In going back to scrutinize the origin of 
Christianity skeptics have found three distin- 
guished early fathers standing directly in 
their pathway ; and such leading unbelievers 
as Eichhorn, Strauss, and others have been con- 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 39 

strained to acknowledge that the testimonies 
of these fathers is irrefragable. I refer to 
Irenaeus of France, Tertullian of Carthage, 
and Clement of Alexandria, all of whom flour- 
ished between A. D. 150 and 220. Irenaeus, 
in his youth, was a disciple of Polycarp in 
Asia Minor. Polycarp had been a disciple of 
St. John, and had talked also with others who 
had seen the Saviour. Thus we see Irenaeus 
was separated from Jesus by only two links. 
It is like connecting our great historian, Ban- 
croft, with the first quarter of the last century 
by Thomas Jefferson, whose life lapped over 
on to Benjamin Franklin's, who reached back 
to that period. Irenaeus died A. D. 202 ; Ter- 
tullian and Clement died about twenty years 
later, and hence were not much more remote 
from the origin of Christianity. What is their 
testimony? 

In a single book, now extant, Irenaeus quotes 
four hundred times from the four gospels, 
more than eighty passages from St. John's 
gospel, and expressly asserts that there are 
four gospels, precisely four, neither more nor 
less — and says the four gospels are the four 
pillars of the Church. He also accepted as 
authentic and canonical Acts, Romans, Gala- 
tians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First 
and Second Thessalonians, First and Second 



40 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Timothy, Titus, First and Second Peter, First 
and Second John. 

Tertullian, in his copious volumes, quotes 
many hundred passages from the gospels as 
proof texts, over two hundred from John's 
gospel. So of other books. 

Clement also makes many similar allusions 
to the New Testament books. 

So high did these fathers rank for character 
and learning, so abundant and well-authenti- 
cated are their extant writings, and so full of 
facts and allusions pertaining to the origin of 
the Christian religion, that rationalists, when 
pressed to the issue, have acknowledged that 
it is of no use to attempt to break this testi- 
mony. 

The first acknowledgment, then, is that the 
testimonies of Irenaeus, Clement, and Tertullian 
in favor of the historic truthfulness of Chris- 
tianity are genuine and beyond dispute. 

But it is claimed that, from the times prior 
to these fathers, no testimony can be adduced 
worthy of acceptance as veritable history. 

Let us go back to this period and see what 
we find. Passing by Justin Martyr, Papias, 
and Polycarp, because they were friends of 
Christianity ; passing by the friendly testimo- 
nies of the catacombs, the monuments, and the 
early Christian sects ; passing also the numer- 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 41 

ous confirmations of the historic accuracy of 
the New Testament records in their allusions 
to the countries, rulers, events, and customs of 
those times, we have, in the first century, 

IT. Testimonies of three distinguished Roman 
adversaries of Christianity. 

I refer to Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, and 
Tacitus, who flourished between the years 
40 and 120 of the Christian era. Having 
their birth within ten or twenty years of the 
death of Jesus, and residing chiefly in Rome, 
the center of intelligence, they attained the 
highest rank for knowledge, candor, and relia- 
bility, and their productions are justly es- 
teemed by critical scholars as the most credi- 
ble of all extant Roman writings. The single 
testimony of either is sufficient to establish 
any matter in Roman history. How much 
more their concurrent testimony. 

They were enemies of the new faith, and 
stigmatized it with opprobrious epithets. Pliny 
called it " an excessive superstition," and for- 
bade the Christians holding any more meet- 
ings in his province. Suetonius characterized 
it as "a mischievous superstition, " and Tacitus 
as " a vile superstition." He also declared 
that " the crimes " of the Christians " called 
for the hand of justice," regarding the intro- 
duction of a new religion, so radically different 



42 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

from the established religion of the empire, as 
a serious offense. 

And yet, notwithstanding their unfriendly 
attitude toward the Christian religion, these 
highly reputable Roman writers bear valuable 
historic testimony in favor of Christianity. 

Suetonius, in his Life of Nero* said, " The 
Christians likewise were severely punished, a 
sort of people who maintained a new and mis- 
chievous superstition. " (About A. D. 64.) 

Pliny, the proconsul of Bithynia, writing to 
the emperor Adrian, about forty years after 
the death of St. Paul, mentioned the Chris- 
tians in his province. He said : f " The whole 
of their fault lay in this, that they met on a 
stated day, as soon as it was light, and ad- 
dressed themselves in a prayer or a hymn to 
Christ, as to God, binding themselves by a 
solemn oath, not for any wicked purpose, but 
never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery ; 
never to falsify their word nor deny a trust 
reposed in them ; after which it was their 
custom to separate and then reassemble to 
eat their meals together in a manner perfectly 
harmless and inoffensive. " 

* Translated by Alexander Thompson, M.D. (London, 
1796), p. 435. 

f See Murphy's Tacitus (Bangs, Brother & Co., New York, 
1852), p. 287, note. 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 43 

Mr. Melmoth, an eminent English scholar 
and lawyer, says this letter of Pliny is a 
" genuine monument of ecclesiastical antiq- 
uity." 

Tacitus, speaking of the great fire in Rome, 
A. D. 64, says that when Nero was accused of 
burning the city he, in turn, charged it upon 
the Christians. 

" Nero judicially accused of the offense, and 
punished with the most studied torments, a set 
of men hated for their wickedness, who were 
commonly called Christians. The author of 
that sect was Christ, who, in the reign of Ti- 
berius, suffered death by sentence of the proc- 
urator Pontius Pilate. The vile superstition, 
repressed for a time, again broke out, not only 
in Judea, the nest of the mischief, but in this 
city also, whither all atrocious and scandalous 
things flow, and where all flourish. At first those 
only were apprehended who confessed them- 
selves of that sect ; afterward a vast multitude 
discovered by them, all of whom were con- 
demned, not so much for the crime of burn- 
ing the city as for their enmity to mankind." 
(Lardner's translation.) 

These three Roman writers unwittingly attest 
the following points : 

That Jesus Christ existed on earth ; that he 
lived in Judea; that he founded a religion; 



44 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

that he was put to death ; that his death oc- 
curred under the sentence of Pontius Pilate, 
during the reign of Tiberius Caesar ; that his 
religion spread rapidly ; that it was radically- 
different from the prevailing religions ; that his 
followers were pure in life ; that they met on 
a stated day for worship ; that they worshiped 
Christ as God ; that they could not be made 
to revile the name of Christ ; that they care- 
fully avoided all wickedness and led harmless 
and inoffensive lives. 

These are fundamental facts connected with 
the origin of Christianity. 

Does some one ask, What does infidelity say 
in reference to these testimonies? I will tell 
you. It has never questioned those of Sue- 
tonius and Pliny, but has felt it important 
to excite doubt in regard to so convincing a 
testimony as that of Tacitus. A few modern 
skeptics have contended that this famous pas- 
sage of Tacitus is spurious — an interpolation, 
inserted into some early manuscripts, by 
Christians, for the purpose of making him bear 
testimony in favor of Christianity. 

Do you ask what I have to say in reply to 
this assertion? I will say nothing, on my own 
part, for in this discussion everything must 
turn on the testimony of our adversaries. Ed- 
ward Gibbon, a leader in skeptical thought 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 45 

in Great Britain at the close of the last cen- 
tury, shall decide this question. In his prep- 
aration for and the writing of his great work, 
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 
he spent twenty years, during which time he 
lived in the midst of Roman manuscripts and 
achieved the reputation of being the best judge 
of their genuineness in his day. What says 
Gibbon?* 

" The most skeptical criticism is obliged to 
respect the truth of this extraordinary fact and 
the integrity of this celebrated passage of Tac- 
itus. 

" The former is confirmed by the diligent and 
accurate Suetonius, who mentions the punish- 
ment which Nero inflicted on the Christians, a 
sect of men who had embraced a new and crimi- 
nal superstition. The latter may be proved by 
the consent of the most ancient manuscripts; by 
the inimitable character of the style of Tacitus ; 
by his reputation, which guarded his text from 
the interpolations of pious fraud ; and by the 
purport of his narrative, which accused the 
first Christians of the most atrocious crimes," 
etc. 

Gibbon thus indorses not only the genuine- 
ness of this celebrated passage, but also the 
high reputation of Tacitus, and the " accuracy " 

*See Milman's Gibbon, Harpers, 1841, vol. i, p. 298. 
4 



46 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

of Suetonius. In subsequent paragraphs we 
find him also fully accrediting the letter of 
Pliny to Adrian. 

There is another passage in Tacitus's history 
deserving attention. Referring to the siege of 
Jerusalem by Titus, he says : * 

" The Christians who resided in the city of 
Jerusalem, finding that Titus was approaching 
at the head of his army, knew their time to 
depart. They saw, according to the warning 
given them by Christ himself, that desolation 
was nigh, and, as commanded, fled to the 
mountains." 

How striking a confirmation of Jesus's words 
(Luke xxi, 20, 21), " When ye shall see Jeru- 
salem compassed with armies, then know that 
the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them 
which are in Judea flee to the mountains ; and 
let them which are in the midst of it depart 
out," etc. 

Here, then, we have three of the most emi- 
nent Roman historians in the first Christian 
century, all positively hostile to Christianity, 
unwittingly bearing testimony to vital his- 
toric facts connected with its origin. 

We have also a distinguished modern ad- 
versary of Christianity testifying to the genu- 
ineness and high character of the testimonies 

* Appendix to Book V, History, Murphy's edition, p. 515. 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 47 

of these three early adversaries. This makes a 
double and twisted proof. 

II L The admissions of learned philosophical 
opposers of Christianity in the first four centu- 
ries. 

The impression is quite common that only 
within a few years has Christianity been sub- 
jected to critical investigation. How false the 
impression ! Christianity had its origin in the 
midst of the learned schools of Alexandria, 
Greece, and Rome, and its most notable early 
opponents were philosophers. During the 
first four centuries it encountered not only 
civil persecution, but also critical investigation 
from learned men, who subjected it to the 
closest scrutiny; but it thrived under this 
treatment. There were Celsus, an Epicurean 
philosopher, in the second century ; Porphyry, 
a man of great abilities and high repute for 
learning, in the third century ; Hierocles, a 
learned man and a magistrate, and Julian, the 
Roman emperor, in the fourth century; all 
of whom opposed Christianity on dogmatic 
grounds. But it is well known that they never 
denied the existence or the historic character 
of the books of the New Testament, or that 
these books were written by the men whose 
names they bear ; nor were the leading facts of 
the gospels disputed. 



48 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

The elaborate treatise written by Celsus 
against Christianity, entitled A True Discourse, 
like many other ancient manuscripts, perished ; 
but its contents are well indicated by the quo- 
tations of Origen, who took pains to answer 
it, proposition by proposition. The work of 
Celsus was written in a spirit of intense hatred, 
and spares no thrust which criticism, calumny, 
and sarcasm could supply. Copious extracts 
from Celsus's writings have been preserved in 
the writings of Origen, and they contain an 
abridgment of the whole gospel history — 
eighty distinct quotations from the books of 
the New Testament, some of them quite 
lengthy. He ridiculed many things, but never 
questioned the authenticity of the books. 

Porphyry, a representative of Neoplatonism 
in the third century, was radically hostile to 
the doctrines of Christianity, notwithstanding 
in his theorizing he borrowed much from it, and 
ascribed to Christ the character of a noble and 
sincere teacher of truth. He accepted the 
books of the New Testament as written by the 
men whose names they bear. Similar state- 
ments might be given of Julian and Hiero- 
cles. 

These early adversaries of Christianity in 
their writings refer to the facts of the gospel 
history, quoting so often and so freely the 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 49 

language of Christ and of the apostles that it 
has been well said, if the New Testament were 
wholly lost out of the world it would not be 
difficult, from the writings of these early learned 
opposers, to make out a tolerable history of 
our Lord. 

Living at a time so near the origin of this 
sect, being men of note and influence, and hav- 
ing access to original sources of information, 
they could have discredited these things relat- 
ing to Christianity if there had been any 
chance to do it ; and this would have been the 
most effectual way to put down the new re- 
ligion. Instead of attempting to do so, they 
admitted these facts without dissent. 

IV. The corroborating acknowledgment of two 
eminent philosophic men of our day. 

Mr. John Stuart Mill, whose well-known 
skepticism will shield him from any charge of 
favoritism toward Christianity, and whose abil- 
ity as a logician will command for his opinion 
the highest respect, has said * in regard to this 
historic question : 

" Whatever else may be taken away from us 
by rational criticism, Christ is still left; a unique 
figure not more unlike all his precursors than 
all his followers, even those who hold the direct 
benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use 

* Essays on Religion (Henry Holt & Co., New York), p. 253. 



50 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

to say that Christ, as exhibited in the gospels, is 
not historical, and that we know not how much 
of what is admirable has been superadded by 
the tradition of his followers. The tradition of 
his followers suffices to insert any number of 
marvels, and may have inserted all the mira- 
cles which he is represented to have wrought. 
But who among his disciples was capable of 
inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of 
imagining the life and character revealed in 
the gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of 
Galilee ; as certainly not St. Paul, whose char- 
acter and idiosyncrasies were of a totally differ- 
ent sort ; still less the early Christian writers, 
in whom nothing is more evident than that the 
good which was in them was all derived, as 
they always professed that it was derived, from 
the higher source." 

Rousseau, the eloquent, gushing French 
skeptic, in his Emile, said : 

" Where could Jesus learn, among his com- 
petitors, that pure and sublime morality of 
which he only hath given us both precept and 
example? The greatest wisdom was made 
known among the most bigoted fanaticism, 
and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues 
did honor to the vilest people upon earth. 
. . . ••••• 

" Shall we suppose the evangelic history a 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 5 1 

mere fiction ? Indeed, my friend, it bears not 
the marks of fiction ; on the contrary, the his- 
tory of Socrates, which nobody presumes to 
doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus 
Christ. Such a supposition only shifts the 
difficulty without obviating it. It is more 
inconceivable that a number of persons should 
agree to write such a history than that only 
one should furnish the history of it. The 
Jewish w r riters were incapable of the diction 
and strangers to the morality contained in the 
Gospel, the marks of whose truth are so strik- 
ing and inimitable that the inventor would be 
a more astonishing character than the hero." 

Thus far in our inquiries into the acknowl- 
edgments of its adversaries we find Christian- 
ity, as to its origin, a genuine historic institu- 
tion, as much so as the French or English 
nation ; we find Jesus Christ a veritable per- 
sonage of history, as much so as Julius Caesar, 
Shakespeare, or Napoleon Bonaparte ; and the 
books of the New Testament as reliable historic 
books as the writings of Tacitus, or Thucydides, 
or Plato. We have gained, then, a sure footing 
inside of the Bible, in the books of the New 
Testament. And all by the concessions of the 
opponents of the Christian religion. 

We might pause here and inquire, What is 
the New Testament without the Old ? Or we 



52 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

might say the Old Testament is vindicated by 
the oft-repeated appeals of the New, calling it 
"the word of the Lord." 

But such a line of argument is not here 
allowed. We have committed the case into the 
hands of our adversaries, and have vowed that 
this discussion shall turn upon their testimonies. 

As to the Old Testament. 

The next question is, What testimony can be 
produced from men opposed to Bible religion, 
or at least standing outside of it, in favor of 
accepting the Old Testament as a veritable 
historic book of religion ? 

i. As to the prophetical and the professedly 
historic books, the Pentateuch excepted. The 
prophetical books and the Psalms cover a 
chronological period identical with the books 
of Samuel, the Kings, and the Chronicles, and 
the events, prophecies, admonitions, encourage- 
ments, etc., are interwoven and interdepend- 
ent, so that they cannot exist if separated, or 
at least they lose their significance. 

As to the reliability of this portion of the 
Old Testament, one of the most distinguished 
as well as one of the severest rationalistic 
critics, De Wette, has said, " that the historic 
certainty of the prophets is unquestionable, 
that the time of their prophecies and the facts 
can be fixed by the surest marks, and that 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 53 

they appear to have been free from prejudices, 
candid and unconstrained by positive fetters, 
without a party, and against every party, sim- 
ply as witnesses for the truth/' 

2. As to the Pentateuch. 

Testimonies of indifferent outsiders: Heca- 
taeus, a friend of Alexander the Great, in the 
fourth century B. C, wrote on the history and 
antiquities of the Jews. From his writings we 
gather incidental confirmations of the several 
leading facts of the Mosaic records : 

That " Egypt was visited by a pestilence," 
which was " charged upon certain strangers 
living among them ; " 

That these strangers "had different customs 
in regard to rites and ceremonies," on account 
of which " the worship of the Egyptian gods 
was neglected ; " 

That " the Egyptians resolved to rid them- 
selves of these strangers, and accordingly 
banished them ; " 

That "the mass of the people fled to 
what is now called Judea," "led by a man 
named Moses, who was distinguished for great 
prudence and courage ; " 

That " this man appointed the sacred rites 
in honor of the Deity, and regulated the civil 
affairs." * 

* Rawlinson's Evidences, p. 254. 



54 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Manetho, an Egyptian, about 300 B. C, 
wrote an Egyptian history. He said of the 
Jews : 

That " their State was organized and their 
laws established by a priest " born in Egypt, 
"whose name, when he joined himself to this 
people, was changed to Moses." * 

Lysimachus, a writer in the Augustan age, 
discoursed concerning Moses and his laws.f 

Polemon, in the first book of his Grecian 
history, §aid : 

" In the reign of Apis, the son of Phoroneus, 
a division of the army of the Egyptians 
deserted Egypt and settled in what is called 
Syria, Palestine, not far from Arabia; these 
were they who were with Moses.' ' 

Justin, a Roman writer, who condensed a 
previously written history by Cornelius Nepos, 
another Roman author, mentioned very many 
of the leading facts of the books of Moses : 

That the origin of the Jews was from the 
region " whence also the Assyrian kings spring, ,, 
which agrees with the Padan-aram from which 
Abraham emigrated to the land of promise ; 

That Abraham and Israel were early " kings " 
or chiefs of the Jews ; 

That Israel's " prosperous family made him 
more famous than any of his ancestors ; " 

* Rawlinson's Evidences, p. 255. \ Ibid., p. 255. 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 55 

That the government was divided among his 
sons ; 

That the youngest of the sons was " Joseph, 
whom the others, fearing his extraordinary 
abilities, secretly made prisoner, and sold to 
foreign merchants ; " 

That they carried him into Egypt, where, 
" by his great powers of mind, he made him- 
self master of the arts of magic and found 
great favor with the king ; " 

That he (Joseph) was " the first to establish 
the science of interpreting dreams," and that 
" nothing of divine or human law seems to 
have been unknown to him ; " 

That " he foretold a dearth in the land some 
years before it happened," and that " all Egypt 
would have perished by famine had not the 
king by his advice ordered the corn to be laid 
up for several years." 

Justin also speaks of " Moses" by name 
(though he mistakes in calling him the son of 
Joseph), and as inheriting " superior knowledge 
and comeliness of person." He also mentioned 
the pestilence in Egypt, the exodus, that Moses 
became the leader of the exiles, that they set- 
tled for a season in the region of Sinai, that the 
seventh day was consecrated as a day of rest.* 

* See Justin, Bonn's Classical Library (London, 1853), 
pp. 244-246. 



56 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Tacitus, another Roman writer, speaks of 
the Assyrian origin of the Jews as one of the 
theories held in his day, of the pestilences in 
Egypt, of Moses as their deliverer, that he 
claimed to be divinely called to be their chief; 
of their venturesome march in the wilderness, 
the want of water and its discovery in a rock, 
the expulsion of the Canaanites, the posses- 
sion of the country, the new r form of worship 
and system of ceremonies given by Moses, the 
sacrifices of rams and oxen, the prohibition of 
swine flesh as an article of food, the fasts, the 
unleavened bread, the Sabbath, the seventh 
year devoted to inactivity, the rite of circum- 
cision, the belief in a future state, the unity of 
God, the spirituality of God, the supreme 
government of God, the prohibition of idola- 
try, the festive days and their unlikeness to 
the pagan rites of Bacchus, etc. — and adds that 
" these rites and ceremonies, from whatever 
source derived, owe their chief support to their 
antiquity/'* What remarkable details for a 
Roman writer to relate ! 

Other early outside testimonies may be pro- 
duced from Eupolemus, Longinus, Juvenal, 
Nicholas of Damascus, etc. f 

* Murphy's Tacitus (Bangs, Brother & Co., New York, 
1852), pp. 498-504. 

f Rawlinson's Evidences, pp. 255, 256. 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 57 

In these testimonies we have the vital his- 
toric facts of the Pentateuch. 

I have next a class of testimonies from 
men more positively hostile to Christianity, 
who not only accept the substantial facts of 
Moses's history, but who vindicate his high 
character and the genuineness of Moses's 
books : 

Numenius, a Pythagorean philosopher, called 
Moses " a man most powerful in prayer to 
God ; " and said, " What is Plato, but Moses 
speaking in the Attic dialect ? " 

Porphyry, one of the most acute and learned 
enemies of Christianity, admitted the genuine- 
ness of the Pentateuch, and acknowledged that 
Moses was prior to Sanchoniathon, a Phoeni- 
cian historian who lived before the Trojan war ; 
and Porphyry also vindicated the truth of San- 
choniathon's account of the Jews, because of 
its agreement with Moses's history. 

The emperor Julian, who wrote powerfully 
against Christianity in the fourth century 
A. D., allowed that the books which bear the 
name of Moses are genuine, and that the facts 
they contain are worthy of credit. 

The genuineness of the Pentateuch was not 
denied by any of the numerous writers against 
Christianity in the first four centuries. 

Mohammed maintained the divine inspiration 



58 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

of Moses and revered the sanctity of the Jew- 
ish laws. 

Testimonies of unfriendly modern critics : 
Many distinguished scholars of modern times, 
who have maintained a rationalistic or a semi- 
rationalistic attitude, and have subjected the 
Old Testament records to the most searching 
criticism, have made some remarkable declara- 
tions. Ewald, Lepsius, Brugsch, Rouge, Bun- 
sen, and others have been brought by the in- 
ternal evidences of the Hebrew Scriptures to 
the conviction of the historic personality of 
Moses and the verity of the fundamental facts 
of his writings. 

Some of these men were the great masters 
of Egyptology, and closely compared the He- 
brew narratives with the monumental and lit- 
erary remains of Egypt. 

Brugsch speaks of certain monuments of 
Rameses II as a highly satisfactory commen- 
tary upon the authentic narrative of the 
Exodus of the Hebrew Scriptures ; and Bun- 
sen, determining Egypt's place in universal 
history, says of the same narrative, " The 
Exodus is an historical fact which occurred in 
an historical age, and was governed by no- 
torious great events and circumstances of im- 
portance to general history ; " and again, with 
even greater emphasis, he says, u History was 



HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 59 

born in that night when Moses, with the law 
of God, moral and spiritual, in his heart, led 
the people of Israel out of Egypt. "* 

De Wette says : " After the exile the whole 
political and ecclesiastical life of the Jews is 
founded on the Mosaic book of the law ; and 
the mention of the present Pentateuch is as 
certain as it is frequent. " 

Such are the acknowledgments of eminent 
scholars, holding low views of inspiration, to 
the historic verity of Moses. 

Other incidental confirmations of the his- 
torical accuracy of the Bible might be adduced 
from outside sources, both historical and monu- 
mental. Allusions to geography, to countries, to 
divisions of countries, to cities, to districts and 
provinces ; to rulers and changes in rulers ; to 
contemporary events ; to prevailing manners 
and customs at different times, however remote ; 
to the condition of nations at different periods, 
their rise and decline — all these things have 
been carefully examined and compared with 
the best profane historians, and also with im- 
partial monuments which have recently been 
discovered, and the substantial historical accu- 
racy of the Bible has been completely demon- 
strated. 

Many of these monuments, Babylonian, 

* Boston Lectures, 1 871, p. 91. 



60 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Egyptian, and Grecian, including also the 
Moabite Stone, are of great antiquity. Their 
inscriptions, which have been deciphered, 
furnish telling confirmations of the historic 
truthfulness of the Old Testament. 



Ube tlranscenbent Gbaracter of Cbris* 
tianits as a IReligious System, 

5 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 63 



CHAPTER III. 

THE TRANSCENDENT CHARACTER OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 

In the previous chapter we imagined our- 
selves visitors to this earth from a far-off 
planet. Approaching in swift flight, at early 
dawn, we met a dark spirit, hovering on 
poised wing. Through the mists of the morning 
we discerned a stately spire, as of some goodly 
temple, pointing heavenward, and asked, "What 
is it ? " He replied, " It is only a myth, an illu- 
sion." As we continued to gaze turrets, towers, 
and battlements loomed up through the depart- 
ing mists. " See ! " we said ; " it must be more 
than a myth." " Nay," he replied, "it is only 
an optical illusion or a subjective vision." 

While we looked the orb of day rose higher 
in the heavens, pouring down his rays upon the 
earth. The mists, gathering up their dripping 
skirts, fled away, revealing a temple of magnifi- 
cent dimensions, securely founded upon a rock. 

In the discussions of the previous chapter 
we saw Christianity, which skeptics have de- 
nounced as a myth with only a legendary 



64 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

origin, and unworthy of rational credence, 
fully vindicated upon a basis of veritable his- 
toric facts, and that, too, by the testimonies of 
its enemies. 

Let us now approach the temple and inspect 
it more closely, but still from without. 

This temple represents Christianity as a 
genuine historic religious system. It stands 
before us in stately, mystic proportions. In 
this chapter I propose to show, from the ac- 
knowledgments of the same class of persons 
as before testified, 

/. The transcendent excellence of Christianity 
as a religious system. 

As to the literary excellence of the Bible 
one unwitting acknowledgment shall suffice. 
When in Paris, Hon. Daniel Webster heard 
an account of a French infidel who happened 
to find in a drawer of his library some stray 
leaves of a volume unknown to him. Like 
most infidels, he had a habit of denouncing the 
Bible, though he never read it. These fugi- 
tive leaves contained the prayer of Habakkuk 
(chap. iii). Being a man of fine literary tastes, 
he was captivated with its poetic beauty, and 
hastened to the club house to announce the 
discovery to his associates. Of course they 
were anxious to know the name of the gifted 
author, to which inquiries the elated infidel re- 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 65 

plied, " A writer by the name of Hab-ba-cook, 
of course a Frenchman." Great was his sur- 
prise when informed that the passage was 
penned by one of God's Jewish prophets. 
" This I regard," said Webster, " as one of the 
sublimest passages of inspired literature." 

But at this point we have to do with the 
moral and religious excellence of Christianity. 

In their better moods, skeptics of the earlier 
and the later times have made extraordinary 
declarations in regard to the elevated character 
of our holy religion. 

Bolingbroke, a distinguished English deist, 
said : " No religion ever appeared in the world 
whose natural tendency was so much directed 
to promote the peace and happiness of man- 
kind as Christianity. No system can be more 
simple and plain than that of natural religion 
as it stands in the gospels. The system of re- 
ligion which Christ published and his evangel- 
ists recorded is a complete system for all the 
purposes of religion, natural and revealed. 
Christianity, as it stands in the Gospels, is not 
only a complete but a very plain system of re- 
ligion. The Gospel is, in all cases, one con- 
tinued lesson of the strictest morality, of justice, 
of benevolence, and of universal charity." 

Thomas Paine said : " Jesus Christ was a 
virtuous and an amiable man. The morality 



66 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

which he preached and practiced was of the 
most benevolent kind. Though many similar 
systems of morality had been preached by 
Confucius and by some of the Greek philoso- 
phers many years before, and by many good 
men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by 
any." 

Mr. John Stuart Mill, one of the most radical 
doubters of our times, says : * " I grant that 
some of the precepts of Christ as exhibited in 
the gospels — rising far above the Paulism 
which is the foundation of ordinary Christian- 
ity — carry some kinds of moral goodness to a 
greater height than had ever been attained be- 
fore, though much even of what is supposed 
to be peculiar to them is equaled in the Medita- 
tions of Marcus Antoninus, which we have no 
ground for believing to have been in any way 
indebted to Christianity, f 

• •«.*••• 

"The 'new commandment to love one 
another ; ' the recognition that the greatest 
are those who serve, not those who are served 
by others; the reverence for the weak and 
humble, which is the foundation of chivalry, 

* Essays on Religion, pp. 97, 98. 

f Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born A. D. 121, in Rome. 
Christianity had been in Rome about one hundred years be- 
fore he reached manhood. 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 67 

they, and not the strong, being pointed out 
as having the first place in God's regard 
and the first claim on their fellow-men; the 
lesson of the parable of the good Samaritan ; 
that of ' He that is without sin, let him first 
cast a stone ; ' the precept of doing as we 
would be done by, and such other noble 
moralities as are to be found, mixed with some 
poetical exaggerations and some maxims of 
which it is difficult to ascertain the precise ob- 
ject, in the authentic sayings of Jesus of Naza- 
reth — these are surely in sufficient harmony 
with the intellect and feelings of every good 
man or woman to be in no danger of being let 
go after having been once acknowledged as the 
creed of the best and foremost portions of our 
species. ,, 

Rousseau said : u If all were perfect Chris- 
tians individuals would do their duty ; the 
people would be obedient to the laws, the 
magistrates incorruptible ; and there would be 
neither vanity nor luxury in such a State." 

Goethe's extreme skeptical attitude is well 
known. But he had times in which he devoted 
considerable attention to the Bible. One day 
his free-thinking friends reproached him for 
wasting his time over the Bible. He replied, 
" I am convinced the Bible becomes more 
beautiful the more I understand it." 



68 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Again he said : " No criticism will be able 
to perplex the confidence which we have 
entertained of a writing whose contents have 
stirred up and given life to our vital energy 
by its own." 

Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, before the Radical 
Club, in Boston, April, 1870, said: " Jesus of 
Nazareth had ideas and beliefs which have 
developed into a Church worshiping his 
name. I find in them a richness of meaning 
and an affluence of power which I have not 
yet exhausted, and w T hich I do not think have 
yet had their full representation or done their 
full work in the world. As I know of no intel- 
lectual theme on which Plato has not some- 
thing to say to me, so on every moral and 
spiritual question, it seems to me, the New 
Testament has something higher for me than 
I find from any other human source/' 

Even Renan had his children brought up 
under the training of Protestant teachers, 
because, as he said, " He feels that they must 
be reared under the discipline of some religion ; 
and he prefers that which has always been in 
favor of liberty. ,, 

Hon. Thomas Jefferson, during a consider- 
able part of his life an avowed unbeliever, 
speaking of the Bible, said: "I have always 
said, and always will say, that the studious 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 69 

perusal of the sacred volume will make better 
citizens, better fathers, and better husbands/ ' 

Professor Huxley said : " By the study of 
what other book could children be so much 
humanized ?" 

A member of the French Academy visiting 
Diderot, one of the leading French infidels, 
found him explaining a chapter of the New 
Testament to his daughter. His visitor ex- 
pressing surprise, Diderot replied, " What bet- 
ter lesson could I give her? " 

Lord Chesterfield, the most polite and well- 
bred man of his times, and also one of the 
greatest wits, imbibed deeply the current 
skepticism of his age, though he was never a 
zealous promoter of infidelity. Being one day 
at Brussels, he was waited upon by Voltaire, 
who invited him to sup with him and Madame 

C . His lordship accepted the invitation. 

The conversation happening to turn upon the 
affairs of England, the lady remarked, " I 
think, my lord, that the Parliament of Eng- 
land consists of several hundred of the best 
improved and most sensible men in the king- 
dom." Chesterfield replied, " True, madam ; 
they are generally supposed to be so." " What, 
then," said she, " can be the reason that they 
tolerate so great an absurdity as the Christian 
religion?" "I suppose, madam," replied his 



yo CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

lordship, " it is because they have not been 
able to substitute anything better in its stead ; 
when they can I do not doubt but in wisdom 
they will readily accept it." 

The carping world is continually making tacit 
acknowledgments of the superior excellence 
of Christianity. It does it in its taunts of the 
inconsistencies of Christians. A young infidel 
was once scoffing at Christianity in the pres- 
ence of Rev. Dr. John M. Mason, on account 
of the misconduct of some of its professors. 
Dr. Mason calmly turned to him and asked, 
" Did you ever know an uproar made because 
an infidel went astray from the paths of mo- 
rality?" The infidel admitted he had not. 
"Then," said Dr. Mason, "you admit Chris- 
tianito is a holy religion by expecting its pro- 
fessors to be holy ; and thus, by your very 
scoffing, you pay it the highest compliment in 
your power/ ' 

Such are the remarkable acknowledgments : 

Bolingbroke — That Christianity is " a com- 
plete system for all the purposes of religion, 
natural and revealed — one continued lesson of 
the strictest morality, justice, benevolence, and 
universal charity." 

Thomas Paine — That " the morality which 
Christ preached was of the most benevolent 
kind ; it has not been exceeded by any." 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 7 I 

John Stuart Mill — That "some of the pre- 
cepts of Christ . . . carry some kinds of moral 
goodness to a greater height than had ever 
been attained before/ ' 

Rousseau — That " if all were perfect Chris- 
tians . . . there would be neither vanity nor 
luxury in such a state." 

Ednah D. Cheney — That " on every moral 
and spiritual question the New Testament has 
something higher for me than I find from any 
other human source." 

Diderot and Huxley — That they could " find 
no better lessons to teach their children than 
those of the Bible/' 

Lord Chesterfield — That it is impossible to 
find anything better than the Christian religion 
to substitute in its place. 

The Christian religion, then, is not only a 
temple of magnificent proportions, but also of 
transcendently glorious character ; the best re- 
ligion by far, even by the confessions of its 
enemies, the world ever saw, with precepts, 
examples, and morals the purest and highest 
ever promulgated, and for which no substitute 
can be found. 

After all, if Christianity is only like a beau- 
tiful ideal temple, or a mere system of refined 
ethics and elevated sentiment, but destitute of 
operating force, with no practical efficiency to 



*]2 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

transform and elevate, it is of little available 
value in such a world as this. 

It is, then, a pertinent question, not to be 
overlooked, Has Christianity any power to 
change and mold the world and make it bet- 
ter? Have any influences emanated from this 
goodly system which have transformed, regen- 
erated, gladdened, and elevated men? What 
have been the actual effects upon society? 
What have our enemies to say about it? 

Let us, then, next notice admissions touching, 

II. Christianity as a reforming and uplifting 
force in the world. 

Gibbon, the distinguished Roman historian, 
and one of the most radical skeptics of his 
time, was, withal, sometimes quite candid in 
his treatment of Christianity, making remark- 
able acknowledgments. He said : " The prim- 
itive Christian demonstrated his faith by his 
virtues. ... It is a very ancient reproach, 
suggested by the ignorance or the malice of 
infidelity, that the [early] Christians allured to 
their party the most atrocious criminals, who, 
as soon as they were touched by a sense of 
remorse, were easily persuaded to wash away 
in the waters of baptism the guilt of their past 
conduct, for which the temples of the gods re- 
fused them any expiation. But this reproach, 
when it is cleared from misrepresentation, con- 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 73 

tributes as much to the honor as it did to the 
increase of the Church. The friends of Chris- 
tianity may acknowledge without a blush that 
many ofthe mosteminent saintshad been,before 
their baptism, the most abandoned sinners/' * 

Mr. Lecky, a radical rationalist, treats Chris- 
tianity with rare candor. In his History of 
European Morals he says : 

" It has been reserved for Christianity to pre- 
sent the world an ideal character which through 
all the changes of eighteen centuries has filled 
the hearts of men with an impassioned love ; 
has shown itself capable of acting in all ages, 
nations, temperaments, and conditions; has 
not only been the highest pattern of virtue, 
but the highest incentive to its practice, and 
has exercised so deep an influence that it may 
be truly said that the simple record of three 
short years of Christ's active life has done more 
to regenerate and soften mankind than all the 
disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhor- 
tations of moralists. It has been the well- 
spring of whatever is best and purest in the 
Christian life. Amid all the sins and failings ; 
amid all the priestcraft and persecution and 
fanaticism that have defaced the Church, it has 
preserved in the character and example of its 
Founder an enduring principle of regeneration." 

* Gibbon's Decline and Fall, i, p. 267. 



74 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Mr. Lecky also said : " The history of self- 
sacrifice during the last eighteen hundred 
years has been mainly the history of the ac- 
tion of Christianity upon the world ; the moral 
type and beauty, the enlarged conceptions and 
persuasive power, of the Christian faith have 
chiefly called it [self-sacrifice] into being, and 
it is by their influence alone that it can be 
permanently sustained. The power of Chris- 
tianity, in this respect, can only cease with the 
annilhilation of the moral nature of mankind. " 

Speaking of the Christian faith, Rousseau 
said : * " A purer faith has given a greater gen- 
tleness to Christian manners. This improve- 
ment is not the work of literature ; for wherever 
literature has previously flourished humanity 
has not been the more respected by its means ; 
the cruelties of the Athenians, the Egyptians, 
the Roman emperors, and the Chinese are ex- 
amples of this truth." 

One day Voltaire entertained at his house in 
Fernay some of the most learned unbelievers of 
the last century. Conversation turning upon the 
Christian religion, Voltaire's guests indulged in 
all sorts of infidel taunts against our holy faith, 
and said all they could to bring it into discredit. 
To the great surprise of his friends, Voltaire 

* Boyle Lectures, by Rev. William Harness, 1821, vol. i, 
p. 165. 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. 75 

sent away all his servants who had been 
waiting at the table, and locked the door to 
prevent their coming in again. u If these serv- 
ants are obedient and honest," he said, u it is 
entirely the result of their religious prejudices. 
One must respect these prejudices, if we do 
not wish to change a set of lambs into fierce 
wild beasts." This was a high compliment to 
Christianity by a man who did more than any 
other in his day to overthrow it. 

More than once does Renan give testimony 
against himself, in the light of which his inter- 
pretation of the life of Jesus is clearly insuffi- 
cient and ridiculous. He concedes that " the 
greatest era in human history dates from Jesus." 
He asks, " Who laid the foundations of a new 
social order? Who opened to drooping hu- 
manity a career of immense progress ? " He 
confesses it was Christ. " All history," he 
says, " is incomprehensible without Christ." 

Two men, one of whom was an infidel, accus- 
tomed to freely denounce Christianity as a 
humbug and its professors as hypocrites, were 
traveling on a western frontier. Spending 
the night in an uninviting cabin, far from the 
borders of civilization, they agreed to share the 
night in watching with their pistols in readi- 
ness for defense. Before retiring to rest their 
host took down his well-worn Bible, read, and 



76 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

fervently prayed, kindly remembering the 
strangers. Retiring to their room, the skeptic, 
to whom had been assigned the first watch, 
instead of preparing his pistols prepared for 
sleep. When reminded by his companion of 
his agreement the infidel confessed that he 
could but feel safe where the Bible was read 
and such prayers offered as they had just lis- 
tened to. 

Mr. James A. Froude says : * " All that we 
call modern civilization in a sense which de- 
serves the name is the visible expression of the 
transforming power of the Gospel." 

Lecky says : f " As a matter of fact Chris- 
tianity has done more to quicken the affections 
of mankind, to promote piety, to create a pure 
and merciful idea, than any other influence that 
has ever acted upon the world." 

Carlyle has well said : J " The Christian reli- 
gion must be regarded as the coming glory, or 
rather the life and soul, of our whole modern 
culture." 

Charles R. Darwin protested against the de- 
preciation of the work of missionaries by infidel 
tourists : 

" The slanderers forget — or rather they will 
not consider — that human sacrifice, the power 

* Short Studies, ii, p. 39. f European Morals, ii, p. 163. 
\ Essays on The Signs of the Times, 



CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM. ^ 

of an idolatrous priesthood, a systematically 
refined sensuality which has no parallel in the 
world — child murder — that all this is put away 
and abolished, and that dishonesty and intem- 
perance and impurity have been to a great 
extent lessened through the introduction of 
Christianity. It is the basest ingratitude on the 
part of writers of travels to forget this. Were 
it their lotto stand in expectation of suffering 
shipwreck on some unknown coast they would 
direct a fervent prayer to heaven that the 
teachings of the missionaries might have 
reached its inhabitants. ,, 

What remarkable acknowledgments we here 
have ! — of Gibbon, that the " Christian demon- 
strated his faith by his virtues, that the 
friends of Christianity may acknowledge with- 
out a blush that many of the most eminent 
saints had been before their baptism the most 
abandoned sinners ; " of Voltaire, that the obe- 
dience and honesty of his servants was due to 
their religion ; and of Lecky that Christian- 
ity through all the century has shown itself 
capable of acting in all nations and tempera- 
ments and conditions ; has not only been the 
highest pattern of virtue, but the greatest in- 
centive to its practice; and that it has done 
more to improve mankind than all that philos- 
ophers and moralists have done. 
6 



78 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

We see, then, that Christianity is something 
more than a beautiful temple, more than a 
lofty ethical and religious ideal, more than a 
refined sentiment ; that out of Christianity flow 
living influences ; that it is an actual operative 
force ; that it is eminently productive of the 
best welfare of society ; that it has checked the 
evil tides of the world ; that it has exerted a 
more powerful purifying and uplifting influ- 
ence than any and all other religions that ever 
appeared upon earth. 

These facts, conceded by men who have re- 
jected Christianity as we understand it, sug- 
gest another inquiry: 

Must not a system of religion so purifying, 
so regenerating, and so potential for good pos- 
sess superhuman and supernatural elements? 
Must it not be divine ? What say our enemies ? 



Ube Divinity of Christianity. 



THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 8 1 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 

I. As to the superhuman character of Christ. 

Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson represented the 
most radical unbelief, and in one place spoke 
of Christianity as " an Eastern monarchy, built 
by indolence and fear," and "dwelling with 
noxious exaggeration about the person of 
Christ." Nevertheless, in a more candid mood 
he expressed great admiration of Christ. In his 
peculiar style he said of Christ, " He saw with 
open eye the mystery of the soul. Alone in all 
history, he estimated the greatness of man." 

Mr. John Stuart Mill did not accept Christ 
as we do, but he was constrained to make re- 
markable acknowledgments as to his high 
character and superior wisdom. He said :* 

" About the life and sayings of Jesus there 
is a stamp of personal originality combined 
with profundity of insight, which, if we 
abandon the idle expectation of finding scien- 
tific precision where something very different 
was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Naz- 

* Essays on Religion, pp. 253, 254. 



82 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

areth, even in the estimation of those who 
have no belief in his inspiration, in the very 
first rank of the men of sublime genius of 
whom our species can boast. When this pre- 
eminent genius is combined with the qualities 
of probably the greatest moral reformer and 
martyr to that mission who ever existed upon 
earth, religion cannot be said to have made a 
bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal 
representative and guide of humanity ; nor, 
even now, would it be easy, even for an un- 
believer, to find a better translation of the rule 
of virtue, from the abstract into the concrete, 
than to endeavor so to live that Christ would 
approve our life." 

Such is the testimony to the lofty character 
of Christ and his teachings, by a " keen, pas- 
sionless logician," a " cold, eagle-eyed detecter 
of sophistries and shams," a " philosopher 
brought up to think religion not worth a 
sensible man's attention." 

Hegel saw in Christ " the union of the 
human and the divine," " the Person in whose 
self-consciousness the union of the human and 
the divine first appears." 

Spinoza spoke of Christ as " the truest symbol 
of heavenly wisdom." 

Strauss said, " He is the highest model of 
religion within the reach of our thought." 



THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 83 

Schelling, " He is the turning point in the 
worlcTs history." 

Fichte, " His followers are nations and gen- 
erations." 

Richter, " He is one who with his pierced 
hands raised empires from their foundations 
and turned the stream of history from its old 
channels/ ' 

The great philosopher Kant testified to the 
ideal perfection of Jesus. When Borowski 
rashly placed too near to each other the names 
of Kant and Christ, Kant nobly said,* " The 
one name is holy, the other that of a poor 
bungler doing his best to interpret him." 

At another time Kant said of Christ, " His 
is one of those names before which the heavens 
bow." 

A study of Renan's work exalts one's rev- 
erence for Jesus. No man can read this book 
and not be conscious of the loftiest and tender- 
est sentiments toward the great Man of sorrows. 
One brief quotation will not be untimely here. 
Recording the death of Jesus, Renan says: 
" Rest now in thy glory, noble imitator. Thy 
work is completed, thy divinity is established. 
For thousands of years the world will extol 
thee. A thousand times more living, a thou- 
sand times more loved since thy death than 

* Works, xi, p. 131 ; Encyclopedia Britannica y xiii, p. 670. 



84 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

during thy pilgrimage here below, thou wilt 
become to such a degree the corner stone of 
humanity that to tear thy name from this 
world would be to shake it from its very foun- 
dations. Complete conqueror of death, take 
possession of thy kingdom. " 

Renan also said : " Whatever may be the 
surprises of the future, Jesus will never be sur- 
passed. His worship will grow young without 
ceasing; his legend [story] will call forth tears 
without end ; his sufferings will melt the no- 
blest hearts, and all ages will proclaim that 
among the sons of men there is none born 
greater than Jesus." 

Again Renan says of Christ: " A matchless 
man, so grand that, although here all must be 
judged from a purely scientific point of view, 
I would not gainsay those who, struck with 
the exceptional character of his work, call him 
God."* 

Again : " Even to-day rationalism does not 
look at him closely except on its knees." f 

De Wette, who furnished Theodore Parker 
and others with the weapons they used so in- 
dustriously against Christianity, at the close of 
his Commentary, said : " Only this I know, in 
no other is there salvation, except in the name 

* Renan's Religious History and Criticism, p. 161. 
f Ibid., p. 213. 



THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 85 

of Jesus Christ and him crucified ; and for the 
human race there is nothing higher than the 
God-man realized in him and the kingdom of 
God planted by him." 

II. The divinity of the system confessed. 

Whatever other acknowledgments skeptics 
have made in their better moods, they have 
generally been very cautious not to concede 
the divinity of Christianity ; but even this 
point has been actually or virtually yielded in 
some remarkable instances. 

How impressive the language of Rousseau ! 
On the side of his unbelief Rousseau may be 
regarded as a rationalistic deist, discarding the 
miraculous and some other primary peculiar- 
ities of Christianity ; and yet he was, at times, 
greatly impressed with the sublimity of the 
system and the lofty character of its Founder, 
and penned a passage seldom equaled for 
eloquence, which even concedes its divinity. 
In his Emile, his treatise on education, he said : 

"I will confess to you that the majesty of 
the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as 
the purity of the Gospel hath its influence on 
my heart. Peruse the works of our philoso- 
phers ; with all their pomp of diction, how 
mean, how contemptible are they compared 
with the Scriptures ! Is it possible that a book 
at once so simple and sublime should be merely 



86 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

the work of man ? Is it possible that the 
sacred Personage whose history it contains 
should be himself a mere man? Do we find 
that he assumed the tone of an enthusiast or 
ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what 
purity in his manner; what an affecting grace- 
fulness in his delivery ; what sublimity in his 
maxims ; what profound wisdom in his dis- 
courses ; what presence of mind, what sub- 
tlety, what truth in his replies ; how great the 
command over his passions ! Where is the 
man, where the philosopher, who could so live, 
and so die, without weakness and without 
ostentation ? 

• ••••• 

" What prepossession, what blindness must 
it be to compare the son of Sophroniscus to 
the Son of Mary! What an infinite dispropor- 
tion there is between them ! Socrates, dying 
without pain or ignominy, easily supported his 
character to the last ; if his death, however 
easy, had not crowned his life, it might have 
been doubted whether Socrates, with all his 
wisdom, was anything more than a vain soph- 
ist. He invented, it is said, the theory 01 
morals. Others, however, had before put 
them in practice. He had only to say, there- 
fore, what they had done, and to reduce their 
examples to precepts. Aristides had been 



THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 8/ 

just before Socrates defined justice ; Leonidas 
had given up his life for his country before 
Socrates declared patriotism to be a duty; the 
Spartans were a sober people before Socrates 
recommended sobriety ; before he had even de- 
fined virtue Greece abounded in virtuous men. 

" The death of Socrates, peaceably philoso- 
phizing with his friends, appears the most 
agreeable that could be wished for; that of 
Jesus, expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, 
abused, insulted, and accused by a whole 
nation, is the most horrible that could be 
feared. Socrates, in receiving the poison, 
blessed, indeed, the weeping executioner who 
administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of 
excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless 
tormentors. Yes, if the life and death of 
Socrates were those of a sage, the life and 
death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we 
suppose the evangelic history in the Gospel, 
the marks of whose truth are so striking and 
inimitable, a mere invention? Then the in- 
ventor would be a more astonishing character 
than the hero. 

"And yet the same Gospel is full of incredible 
things, of things opposed to reason, and which 
it is impossible for a sensible man to conceive 
or admit. But what shall I do amid such 
contradictions? Remain modest and circum- 



88 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

spect, my child ; respect in silence what we 
can neither reject nor comprehend, and be 
humble before the great Being who alone 
knows the truth. " * 

When Voltaire read this passage he was 
incensed against Rousseau for his reverence 
for Jesus, and cried out, "The Judas! the 
Judas ! he deserts us when we are about to 
triumph." 

Renan, like Rousseau, was a gushing 
writer, and both of them often exhibited a 
diverse, double consciousness. Renan made 
remarkable acknowledgments and exhibited 
high admiration for Jesus, even while apply- 
ing to his life and teachings the sharp knife 
of merciless criticism. In one place he says, 
" The highest knowledge of God that ever 
existed in the bosom of humanity was that of 
esus. 

Again he tells how Christ regarded himself: 
" The title Son of man expresses his rank as 
Judge ; that of Son of God, his participation 
in the plans and power of the Supreme 
Being. This power is unlimited. No one 
knoweth the Father but himself. He forgives 
sins ; he is superior to David, to Abraham, to 
Solomon, and to the prophets/' He then 
proceeds to say : " We do not deny that in 

*Bookvi, Works, vol. ix (Geneva, 1782), pp. 147-151. 



THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 89 

these affirmations existed the germ of the 
doctrine which subsequently made him a 
divine hypostasis and identified him with 
the Word." 

Again he breaks out in the highest acknowl- 
edgment of Jesus: " He is the incomparable 
man, to whom universal conscience has de- 
creed the title of the Son of God, and that 
with justice, for he gave to religion an impulse 
with which probably no other can be com- 
pared. Whatever is most excellent in every 
one of us we owe to him. He is more than a 
reformer of an obsolete religion : he is the 
center of the eternal religion of humanity. 

" I have before me two witnesses, one of 
the first century, the other of the nineteenth ; 
both trustworthy as to what they have seen, 
but of questionable authority in respect to 
what they have not seen. The one is St. 
John, to whom I will refer for the life of 
Jesus. The other is yourself, to whom I will 
refer for the work of Jesus, after the lapse of 
eighteen centuries. These two witnesses to- 
gether make his divinity resplendent before 
my eyes." 

Schelling died in 1854, having ranked in the 
first class of modern thinkers. A disciple of 
Fichte, and a friend and rival of Hegel for 
many years, he inculcated a system of panthe- 



£)0 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

ism ranging from the idealistic to the realistic. 
In his later days his views underwent a consid- 
erable modification. Three years before his 
death, in a great assembly composed of the 
elite of Berlin, he frankly declared, " After all, 
our philosophy is only negative." About the 
same time he said to a friend that he had in- 
tended to prepare a book exhibiting the har- 
mony of revelation and philosophy. When 
asked for the keynote of this harmony he went 
to his library and took down an old copy of 
the Greek Testament and read Rom. xi, 36: 
" For of him [Christ], and through him, and to 
him, are all things : to whom be glory forever. 
Amen." " There," said he, with simplicity, 
" is the foundation and the last word of philos- 
ophy. It is the Holy Scriptures that gives 
them to us." This is the mature thought of a 
man whose genius, learning, and philosophical 
ability no man can question. Abandoning the 
vain conceptions of pantheism, he adopted the 
saying attributed to Mirandola, " Philosophy 
seeks, Christianity possesses, the truth." 

Peterborough, a distinguished English unbe- 
liever, lodged one night with the devout Fene- 
lon, at Cambray, and was so deeply impressed 
with his piety that he was constrained to say 
to a friend : " I must not stay in the presence 
of this holy man ; if I do I shall be compelled 



THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 9 1 

to renounce my infidelity. So much purity, so 
much amiableness, proves the reality of his re- 
ligion, and proves that religion to be of heav- 
enly origin. " 

Lecky says : * " The great characteristic of 
Christianity and the proof of its divinity is that 
it has been the main source of the moral de- 
velopment of Europe, and that it has discharged 
this office, not so much by the inculcation of 
a system of ethics, however pure, as by the as- 
similating and attractive influence of a perfect 
ideal. The moral progress of mankind can 
never cease to be distinctively and intensely 
Christian as long as it consists of a gradual ap- 
proximation to the character of the Christian 
Founder. There is, indeed, nothing more won- 
derful in the history of the human race than 
the way in which that ideal has traversed the 
lapse of ages, acquiring new strength and 
beauty with each advance of civilization, and 
infusing its beneficent influence into every 
sphere of thought and action." 

Again : f " Christianity, the life of morality, 
the basis of civilization, has regenerated the 
world." 

Mr. John Stuart Mill affords another valu- 
able concession : " The most valuable part of 

* History of European Morals, i, p. 336, English edition. 
f Ibid., i, p. 205. 



92 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

the effect on the character which Christianity 
has produced, by holding up in a divine Per- 
son a standard of excellence and a model for 
imitation, is available even to the absolute un- 
believer, and can nevermore be lost to human- 
ity. For it is Christ, rather than God, whom 
Christianity has held up to believers as the 
pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the 
God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews 
or of nature, who, being idealized, has taken so 
great and salutary a hold upon the modern mind." 

Mr. Alcott has said : " An impersonal faith 
will not satisfy. A personal Mediator, uniting 
the human and the divine, alone suffices. Only 
as the Word becomes incarnate is the religious 
sentiment fairly addressed, the revelation cor- 
dial and complete." 

What acknowledgments ! 

Of Rousseau : That it is " impossible that the 
Gospel should be merely the work of a man ; " 
that there is an " infinite disproportion between 
Jesus and Socrates ; " that if " the life and 
death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life 
and death of Jesus were those of a god." 

Of Renan: That Christ was more than "a 
reformer" — " he is the center of the eternal 
religion of humanity ; " that the life of Jesus 
and the effect of it on the world " make his 
divinity resplendent before our eyes." 



THE DIVINITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 93 

OfSchelling: That "the Holy Scriptures give 
us the foundation and last word of philosophy," 
and that the words of St. Paul, " Of him 
[Christ], and through him, and to him, are all 
things," are " the keynote of the harmony of 
all truth." 

Of John Stuart Mill : That " it is the God 
incarnate that has taken so great a hold upon 
the modern mind." 

Of Mr. Alcott : That " a personal Mediator, 
uniting the human and the divine, alone 
suffices." 

Of De Wette : That " there is nothing higher 
than the God-man realized in him [that is, 
Christ], and the kingdom of God planted in 
him." 
7 



jfour Xeabing Wtal Doctrines. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 97 



CHAPTER V. 

FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 

In the discussions of the three preceding 
chapters we reached the conclusion that Chris- 
tianity stands, like a magnificent temple, on a 
veritable historic basis, invested with moral 
grandeur, the center and source of the most 
potent uplifting and transforming influences 
the world ever saw, and bearing unmistakable 
marks of divinity — and all by the acknowledg- 
ments of its adversaries, in their better moods. 

Let us now enter within the sacred precincts 
of this goodly temple and contemplate some 
of its interior pillars. We cannot take time to 
notice all of these interior columns ; but there 
are four of them to which your attention is 
invited, which represent four great doctrines 
of Christianity : 

The Deity of Christ ; 

The Expiatory Atonement ; 

Experimental Religion ; 

Future Rewards and Punishments. 

These four doctrines are central and vital 
to the Christian system, as we understand it. 



98 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Yield these, and, with what will follow by im- 
plication, directly or indirectly, we have the 
whole Christian religion. 

The doctrine of the deity of Christ involves 
the superhuman and supernatural elements of 
the Christian faith, with miracles, virtually his 
resurrection and ascension, his authority as a 
religious teacher, and the binding force of the 
religion which he founded for all time. 

The doctrine of the expiatory atonement 
implies the moral government of God over 
men as moral beings, the sinful, helpless, and 
lost condition of the race, God's unalterable 
holiness and justice, and his wonderful com- 
passion and love. 

The doctrine of experimental religion im- 
plies the quickening, transforming, and renew- 
ing power of divine grace in the human soul, 
bringing men into new relations to God, ele- 
vating them into a new character and life, and 
sustaining them therein, all under the power of 
the Holy Spirit supernaturally exerted in them. 

The doctrine of future rewards and punish- 
ments implies man's accountability, immortal- 
ity, the judgment, etc. 

With these four doctrines, therefore, we have 
the most vital and essential elements of Chris- 
tianity. Without them we have only Chris- 
tianity with Christianity left out. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 99 

These doctrines, in the form in which we 
state them, have been for the most part pe- 
culiar to the " evangelical " Churches ; the 
" liberal" Churches, so called, so far as they 
hold them, accept them in a modified form, 
that leaves out what we regard as the most 
vital and effective operative elements. 

But it is remarkable what important ac- 
knowledgments have been made, in regard to 
these most vital points, by those who have 
openly controverted them. 

/. The Deity of Christ. 

By this we mean, not that in some low or 
accommodated sense Christ is divine, as some 
have spoken of the divine Plato or the divine 
Socrates, but far more than this; we mean 
that in the fullest sense Christ was God — the 
God-man — that essential, unlimited deity was 
united with humanity in the extraordinary 
personage Christ Jesus. Touching this precise 
point we have remarkable acknowledgments 
from Unitarian sources. 

Two gentlemen were once disputing on the 
divinity of Christ. One of them, who argued 
against it, said, " If it were true, it certainly 
would have been expressed in more clear, un- 
equivocal terms. ,, "Well," said the other, "ad- 
mitting that you believed it, were you author- 
ized to teach it, and allowed to use your own 



100 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

language, how would you express the doctrine 
to make it clear and indubitable ? " "I would 
say," replied the first, " that Jesus Christ is 
the true God." " You are happy," rejoined the 
other, "in the choice of your words, for you have 
happened to hit upon the very words of inspi- 
ration. St. John, speaking of Christ, says, 
* This is the true God, and eternal life.* " 

The acknowledgments we present are none 
of them from inferior, but from representative, 
men. 

Rev. E. H. Sears, as editor of the Monthly 
Religious Magazine, of the Unitarian denomi- 
nation, said : 

" In days of darkest corruption, and amid 
the most awful wickedness of an apostate 
Church, there have been multitudes who have 
lived and died in the sanctity of a genuine 
faith. And what has been the doctrine that 
has laid hold upon them and saved them ? 
We believe it will be found to have been the 
essential divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, of- 
fering the divine Person to the humble believer. 
This has been the saving element which no 
corruption could completely overlay." 

Again, Mr. Sears says : 

"That the doctrine of Christ's essential 
divinity is set forth in the New Testament — 
yea, that it breaks from its pages in a blaze of 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. IOI 

glory — is the almost unanimous agreement of 
Christian believers. In the incarnation, the 
life, and the mediation of Christ, there is a 
full expression of the Godhead, the essential 
divinity coming down into visible personality 
for the salvation of men. Never are we invited 
to come to the Father by climbing round the 
personality of the Son. . . . That the essen- 
tial divinity in Christ is not a person separated 
from the Father, another person, but consub- 
stantial with the Father, and revealing the 
whole Godhead in one glorious Person, 'all 
the fullness of the Godhead bodily/ is plain 
even in the letter." 

Again, the same writer says : 

" The radical Christology, the humanitarian, 
the Arian, the tripersonal — I know what they 
all are . . . and reject them. . . . I apprehend, 
too, the idea of what the Church calls ' the hy- 
postatic union ;' that is, the more interior union, 
an inexistence of natures, the divine with the 
human nature of Christ, . . . and which I 
must believe or set aside the Book of John." * 

Rev. James W. Thompson, D.D., an eminent 
Unitarian minister, in the Christian Examiner, 
a bimonthly magazine of that denomination, 
said : 

" Does some prophet, seeing in him God 

* In this extract the omissions are only personal allusions. 



102 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

manifested, call him Immanuel? Verily, in 
him God is with us. Beholding in vision the 
miraculous establishment, the strength and 
wisdom, the peacefulness and perpetuity of the 
Messiah's reign, does he name him * Wonderful, 
Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, 
Prince of Peace ? ' Amen. The prophet cannot 
go beyond the historian ; nay, the historian and 
the prophet meet in the mount of holy con- 
templation, using the same lofty imagery to in- 
vest with superhuman attributes the peerless 
object of their common admiration and praise. 
Glorying in the regal majesty and dominion 
of his Lord, does some raptured saint, with 
his ear near to God, hear a ' voice from the 
excellent glory ' addressing the Son : ' Thy 
throne, O God, is forever and ever; a scepter 
of righteousness is the scepter of thy king- 
dom. Thou hast loved righteousness and 
hated iniquity ; therefore God, even thy God, 
hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness 
above thy fellows/ Even so, Amen. Lau- 
date Dominum. We rejoice; we give thanks; 
we chant our response with the Church, and 
say, ' God of God, Light of Light, very God of 
very God ; ' not homoiousian with the Arians, 
but homoousian with the Athanasians ; and 
none shall receive a heavier meaning from those 
divinely loaded words than we." 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. IO3 

The Christian Examiner, the Unitarian pe- 
riodical, makes a remarkable admission. An 
eloquent writer in this magazine is clear- 
sighted enough to perceive that the belief in 
the deity of Christcan not be eradicated from 
the human heart. He says : 

" Again and again its defenses have been 
battered down and the doctrine itself logically 
demolished ; yet somehow it has survived all its 
destructions. It is one of the oldest doctrines 
of the Church. Nine tenths of the strongest 
and best Christians that ever lived have 
believed it. It is connected with the great 
revivals of religion ; it is as prominent in all 
light of modern science as in the darkest night 
of the Middle Ages, and is held to-day by the 
whole Christian world, Protestants as well as 
Roman Catholics, except a mere handful of 
liberals, as a most vital part of its religious faith. 
All past experiences show that to attack the 
Trinity, or, what is now becoming the chief point 
in the doctrine, the deity of Christ, on its logical 
side, is utterly in vain. It is clung to in the 
faceoftheclearest demonstrations of its untruth. 
It somehow feeds the soul, gives it fullness of 
the divine nature ; and what avails it to prove 
by argument that the food is dust and ashes, 
when millions of beings are using it every day, 
and find it gives them health and strength ?" 



104 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Why cannot this doctrine be eradicated 
from the human mind ? For a double reason : 
the Bible manifestly teaches it, and the human 
heart needs it. 

Rev. Samuel P. Putnam, D.D.,* an eminent 
Unitarian minister, said : " Not much is ac- 
complished when it is proved that Jesus is not 
God. When we do this he ceases to be a 
central fact, a leader, a Saviour. Only God in 
his infinitude can be these ; only he can satisfy 
our innermost needs. No finite being, how- 
ever perfect and glorious, can do it." 

77. The A tenement Vicarious and Expiatory. 

Not that in some low sense Christ suffered 
for us vicariously — as a mother suffers for the 
child to which she gives birth, or the patriot 
suffers for his country — but that he stood in 
our stead, and died u the just for the unjust/' 
and that his sufferings were an expiation for 
our sins ; that Christ was the propitiation, not 
the mercy seat or the altar, but the propitiatory 
sacrifice. 

This doctrine has been denounced by liberal- 
ists, so called, as " absurd/' unworthy of accept- 
ance by rational minds, and they have stigma- 
tized it as "a blood theology; " but some of 
them, in better moods, have made generous 
concessions in favor of it. 

* Religious Monthly Magazine, February, 1S74, pp. 134, 156. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. IO5 

Gesenius, the eminent biblical scholar and 
author, who certainly cannot be accused of or- 
thodox prejudices, writing upon Isa. liii, says: 
" Most Hebrew readers acquainted with offer- 
ings and substitution must necessarily under- 
stand the words of this chapter as asserting 
it; and there is no doubt that the apostolic 
representation, in respect to the propitiatory 
death of Christ, rests in a manner altogether 
preeminent on this ground. " 

An infidel once said to a Christian, " The 
idea that the blood of Christ can wash away 
sin is foolishness/ ' The Christian replied, 
"You and St. Paul agree exactly." " How 
so?" asked the infidel. "In Corinthians Paul 
says, ' The preaching of the Gospel is to them 
that perish foolishness.' " The skeptic hung 
his head, studied the Bible, and became a 
Christian. 

A writer in the Christian Examiner (Uni- 
tarian, 1856, vol. xv, p. 407, etc.) said: "The 
most earnest representations of the necessity 
and efficacy of the cross to the redemption of 
mankind which have ever come from an ortho- 
dox pulpit are fully sustained by the phrase- 
ology of the apostles. Whether the sacrificial 
terms they employed have been rightly under- 
stood or not, by those who have been most fond 
of borrowing them, the apostles, and not their 



106 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

imitators, are responsible for the connection of 
those terms, and the peculiar ideas they sug- 
gest, with the Saviour's death. It is they who 
have called Christ ' our sacrifice/ a ' sin offer- 
ing/ ' a propitiation for our sins/ It is they 
who have declared that ' he was made sin for 
us ; ' that he suffered for us, * the just for the 
unjust ; ' that he ' died for all/ who else were 
virtually dead ; that ' he hath purchased the 
Church with his own blood/ and that his ' blood 
cleanseth from all sin/ While these texts and 
such as these are found scattered over the New 
Testament — coloring, indeed, the whole cur- 
rent of its language — it should be remembered 
that the burden of proof rests upon those who 
would explain away their obvious meaning and 
divest the doctrine of the cross of the drapery 
which they have thrown around it. Nor is the 
responsibility in such a case to be lightly 
estimated, nor is the work undertaken an easy 
one. If in one instance the apparent sense of 
a text of the class alluded to is explained away, 
you are met directly by another which puts 
your critical ingenuity to a severer test ; and 
when all is done that your hermeneutical skill 
can devise, the general tone of the New Tes- 
tament still remains, interposing a new diffi- 
culty and weakening with common readers the 
force of your labored interpretations/' 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 107 

It has been currently reported that on one 
occasion Rev. T. Starr King frantically ex- 
claimed, " Away with your blood religion ! " 
And yet this eminent representative of the so- 
called " liberal " religion was a man of a broad 
and generous nature, of noble moods, some- 
times showing rare magnanimity toward his 
opponents. In his installation sermon at 
the settlement of Rev. E. H. Chapin, D.D., 
in New York city, he uttered a glowing 
eulogium * upon " the expiatory system. " 
After setting forth in the strongest terms 
the doctrine of the atonement, as held in or- 
thodox Churches, and dissenting from it, he 
nevertheless proceeded to pronounce upon it 
the most eloquent eulogium ever printed. 
He said : 

" It is ennobled by the holiest memories, as 
it has been consecrated by the loftiest talent 
of Christendom. It fired the fierce eloquence 
of Tertullian in the early Church, and gushed in 
honeyed periods from the lips of Chrysostom ; 
it enlisted the lifelong zeal of Athanasius to 
keep it pure ; the sublimity of it fired every 
power and commanded all the resources of the 
mighty soul of Augustine ; the learning of 
Jerome and the energy of Ambrose were com- 

* Published in full in the Liberal Christian, March 30, 
1867. 



108 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

mitted to its defense ; it was the text for the 
subtle eye and analytic thought of Aquinas ; it 
was the pillar for Luther's soul toiling for 
man ; it was shaven into intellectual propor- 
tions and systematic symmetry by the iron 
logic of Calvin ; it inspired the beautiful humil- 
ity of Fenelon ; fostered the devotion and self- 
sacrifice of Oberlin ; flowed like molten metal 
into the rigid forms of Edwards's intellect, and 
kindled the deep and steady rapture of Wes- 
ley's heart. 

" And while this expiatory system of the 
Gospel is venerable for its age and the long list 
of splendid minds which it has educated, and 
which are still the ornaments of the Church, it 
is equally imposing when we reflect upon the 
labors and schemes which it has quickened 
and generated for spreading the knowledge 
and power of the Gospel in the world. Its 
advocates have felt the impulse of every mo- 
tive to ardent and constant zeal which the love 
of Christ and humanity could inspire. The 
philanthropy which delights to raise men from 
ignorance and pour around them the light of 
truth and encouragement to virtue has been 
trebly quickened by the feeling of the awful 
consequences which must follow their con- 
tinued ignorance of God and the appointed 
means of redemption from human infirmity 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. IO9 

and sin. All the great enterprises of Christian 
history have been born from the influence, im- 
mediate or remote, which this vicarious theory 
of redemption has exercised upon the mind 
and heart of humanity. . . . The man who has 
faith in it must be a maniac or a missionary. 
. . . It has linked itself with mighty energy 
to the long, deeply freighted train of human 
interests. . . . 

" It is to the burning zeal which the terrors 
connected with the expiatory view of the Gos- 
pel inspired that we owe the thousand-handed 
labors of the modern Church, taxing our wealth 
and using with cunning arts all the appliances 
of mechanical invention for the instruction of 
the ignorant and the heathen and the wider 
diffusion of the word of God. It is to this 
that we owe the printing of the Bible in the 
Cherokee and Choctaw tongues ; it is this 
which has sent missionaries to the Hindus 
and the Hottentots, in their own speech, to talk 
of Jesus ; has built chapels to the Mediator on 
the shores of the Oregon and the Amazon ; 
which hung the cross as the sign of redemp- 
tion in the Arctic and the Antarctic sky ; which 
has made the Andes and the Himalayas echo 
to trinitarian prayers, and planted the banner 
of the Gospel on the banks of the Ganges and 
the Nile." 
8 



110 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

In view of the preceding concessions it is not 
strange that Rev. F. D. Huntington, D.D.,* 
on leaving the Unitarian Church, should say 
that the views held by liberalists " stand con- 
victed as inadequate and unscientific by the 
facts, unphilosophical by the reason, jejune by 
the religious affections, and unhistorical by the 
past, while they put upon the Gospel itself the 
aspect of a stupendous self-misunderstanding. 
The profounder, richer, and more inspiring 
doctrine, however imperfectly set forth as yet 
in any extrascriptural statement, lies at the 
heart of the New Testament, has its majestic 
foreshadowings in the Old, and has given its 
historic impulse to the life of the Church. " 

In a recent issue of the British Weekly the 
Rev. John Watson, pastor of the Sefton Park 
Presbyterian Church, Liverpool, who is better 
known as " Ian Maclaren," tells the following 
about Matthew Arnold: 

" Matthew Arnold's brother-in-law, Mr. Crop- 
per, attended our church, and that was how he 
came to be in the church on that Sunday. It 
was sacrament morning, and I preached on the 
1 Shadow of the Cross/ We afterward sang the 

hymn, 

* When I survey the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of glory died.' 

* Monthly Religious Magazine, vol. xx, p. 367. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. Ill 

" Mr. Arnold left before the communion and 
went home. As he came down stairs from his 
bedroom to lunch a servant, who was close to 
the dining room door, heard him saying softly 
to himself the first lines of the hymn. ... At 
luncheon Mr. Arnold spoke about the hymn, 
which, he said, was the finest in the English 
language. Afterward he went out and in ten 
minutes was dead." 

///". Experimental Religion. 

By experimental religion we mean that 
a divinely wrought experience, or spiritual 
change, is begotten in truly believing souls, 
lifting them up into higher possibilities of 
character, of comfort, and of life, than unaided 
human nature could attain unto ; and this ex- 
perience flows from the gracious efficacy of 
Christ's death to those who personally accept 
him as their Saviour. 

Such an experience has been stigmatized as 
an " hallucination of the fancy," " a phantasm." 
But even those who have thus discarded and 
reproached it have sometimes made generous 
acknowledgments in favor of it. 

The Religious Monthly Magazine (Unitarian, 
i860, vol. xxiii, pp. io6-3), said: "It is a 
personal vital union of the disciple with his 
Saviour that causes the divine life to pass 
into him and transform him into the divine 



112 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

image, and produce, from within, outwardly, 
not a putative, but a genuine, righteousness. 
When we are weak or cowardly in the face 
of duty, or braced up only by the pride of self 
or the fear of man, it is rest in that almighty 
friendship that gives both the docility of a 
child and the strength of a multitude of 
martyrs. There is other virtue that is hardy 
and brave, austere, and sometimes cruel, for 
the cause and glory of God. This, from the 
living and indwelling Christ, has both the 
tenderness and omnipotence of Him who 
breathes it into us ; for its strain of acknowl- 
edgment is, "Thy gentleness hath made me 
great." This . . . has been the renewing 
power of Christianity, and wrought all the 
graces, and the righteousness, and the zeal, and 
the piety distinctively Christian ; for this is 
where God meets the soul and has his taber- 
nacle with men. This is the door through 
which he comes and floods the heart with his 
strength and love. This made Methodism a 
saving and regenerating power, while the 
other Churches lay high and dry on the sands 
of faith alone. It works the deepest and 
richest Christian experience. It breathes and 
quivers through Moravian hymns. It shows 
man all the depths and windings of his de- 
pravity, and in the same measure supplies 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 113 

God's inexhaustible grace. It gives him the 
peace that flows like a river and fertilizes all 
his nature, as earthly fountains are becoming 
dry. It gives the Christian Church all the 
efficiency which it has for positive good in 
the world." 

An eminent lawyer, skeptical in relation to 
Christianity, who seldom or never entered the 
house of God, was passing by a Methodist 
church one evening. He heard singing ; it 
arrested his attention, and he concluded he 
would look in and see what was going on. He 
entered the house of prayer, drawn by the 
sweet notes of sacred song, and took his seat 
in the back part of the congregation. It 
turned out to be a love feast, and there was a 
large congregation present. He listened with 
the most profound attention. After the service 
had opened a gentleman got up whom he 
knew very well — a respectable merchant in 
that city — and began to tell his experience. 
He said : " So many years ago I was a poor, 
careless, thoughtless young man ; proud, 
haughty, and empty-headed too ; but the 
Spirit of God arrested me ; I was brought to 
think seriously of my condition, was convinced 
that I was a poor sinner, and felt that if I 
died as I was then I would be damned for- 
ever. I made up my mind to seek God. I 



114 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

sought and found him." And, with streaming 
eyes, he declared that at that moment he 
realized the comfortable assurance of his 
acceptance with God, and sat down. Presently 
a physician, with whom this gentleman was 
intimate, rose and gave his testimony concern- 
ing the same experience, the same blessed 
fact ; and a lawyer, who had pleaded with him 
many a time at the same bar, arose in another 
part of the house and bore witness to the 
same fact — not to theory, but testified that 
the grace of God had saved him and had 
made him then and there to rejoice with joy 
unspeakable and full of glory. And so it went 
round the congregation. After a little the 
negroes in the gallery began to speak, and one 
old patriarch, with his head white, trembling 
upon the verge of the grave, bore testimony 
to the same fact in his broken, simple accents, 
that God had had mercy upon him and writ- 
ten his name in heaven. Then another rose, 
and another, until some forty witnesses de- 
clared in various phrases to this great truth, 
that they had sought the Saviour, that he had 
pardoned their sins, had taken away the fear 
of death, and that they were then reconciled 
to God and heirs of everlasting life. 

The lawyer said to himself, " Well, what can 
I do with this?" He understood the point. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 1 1 5 

Said he: "I have not a witness in the universe 
that I can bring to rebut that testimony. 
Here are forty witnesses to one single fact, and 
I have been rejecting the counsel of God all 
my life. ,, He looked around him and said : 
"Argument, philosophy, and sophistry cannot 
do it ; they are witnesses to a fact. There 
must be truth in it ; I cannot gainsay it ; there 
is not one of these men who have spoken here to- 
night whose testimony would be refused for one 
moment in a court of justice, and the testimony 
of any one or two of them would hang the best 
man in this community of crime if they should 
testify of his guilt." He said, " They have testi- 
fied not of a theory, but of a fact." The result was 
that he yielded his heart to God, experienced 
the same change, and became a witness too. 

At the anniversary of the Free Religious 
Association, in 1867, Colonel T. W. Higgin- 
son, referring to the religion of the southern 
negroes, said : " I have seen many a southern 
freedman, with his quaint songs and half-pagan 
dances, which half of the hearers in this room 
would think more convivial than moral ; and 
yet I have seen, trained upon that poor diet, 
exhibitions of spiritual strength which the 
noblest of you might be proud to emulate." * 

Near the close of his Life of Jesus Renan 

* Report, p. 51. 



Il6 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

says: " Marcus Aurelius left behind an execrable 
son, beautiful books, and a transitory world ; 
but jesus remains to the world an inexhaustible 
source of moral regeneration. Philosophy is 
not enough for the masses ; it requires sanc- 
tity. Jesus is that individual who has caused 
his species to make the greatest advances 
toward the divine." 

Rev. T. Starr King, in a discourse * on the 
expiatory view of the atonement, speaks in 
most eloquent language of the spiritual experi- 
ence which follows its acceptance. He says: 

" Think of the emotions which this system 
inspires in the intense believer's heart. What 
lowly humility, what unbending pride! What 
horror, and w r hat ecstasy ! What fear of God, 
and what love of Jesus ! What pity for the 
unconscious sinner, what flinty sternness to- 
ward the Redeemer's willful foes ! The mean- 
est souls, who, according to the expiatory 
system, imagine they have obtained salvation, 
if they only appreciate the meaning of the 
word, are conscious of an experience which 
none of us can know, and which language is 
too feeble to express. 

" On the rich and the eloquent, the noble 
and the priest, they may look down with con- 
tempt ; for they may esteem themselves rich in 

* Liberal Christian, March 30, 1867. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 117 

a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a 
more sublime language ; nobles by right of an 
earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of 
a mightier hand. Nothing is so well fitted to 
inspire a settled and stubborn stoicism toward 
all temporal interests and fascinations of earthly 
life. What distinctions can charm the senses of 
a spirit confident that its name is written in the 
Book of Life, and seeing before it the glories 
of a sternly guarded paradise ? What terrors 
can frighten the heart that has been delivered 
from the fiery surges of Tartarus ? What ser- 
vility can bend the knees to any earthly degra- 
dation which have been raised in triumph from 
before the eternal throne? What horrors can 
be heeded for a moment by the soul that has 
stood beneath the awful cross and felt the con- 
secrating bloody baptism from the wounded 
brow and the opened side of a dying God ? 
Surely nothing in paganism ever reached such 
depths of the soul as this ! 

" And surely no set of religious emotions, so 
original, so strong and pure, were ever awakened 
in the human soul as those which the expiatory 
scheme infused into the heart of humanity ; and 
surely no vision born from the poetic fancy or 
the deep religious reverence of any people, to 
be enshrined in the mythology of the world, 



Il8 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

can equal the Christian conception of the in- 
finite Redeemer in his heavenly glory for a 
fallen race/' 

IV. Future Rewards and Punishments. 

There have been many stiff denials of the 
various phases of the doctrine of retribution, 
and as many remarkable acknowledgments, 
under every phase of the question. It is in- 
deed surprising how differently men have talked 
about it. 

There are some singular freaks of human 
nature even in theological matters. What 
men most loudly say is sometimes the most 
lucid confession that they really believe the 
opposite. Hence Josh Billings's pungent 
satire : " What a man iz the most afraid of he 
sez he don't believe in ; this may ackount for 
some men's unbelief in hell." 

Several things may be regarded as almost 
universally conceded : 

1. That as moral beings we live under an 
administration of rewards and punishments. I 
know of no one who denies this proposition, 
only some may have a choice whether the term 
" punishment," " discipline," or " retribution " 
should be used. That, however, is only a ques- 
tion about terms, nothing more. 

2. That this law of retribution reaches into the 
future world is also almost universally allowed. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. II9 

The old doctrine of Rev. Hosea Ballou, that 
all the consequences of sin are confined to 
this life, and that all, at death, go immediately 
to heaven, is not now taught in any pulpit of 
any denomination. 

3. The fearfulness of future retribution is 
also acknowledged. Rev. W. E. Channing, 
D.D., said:* 

" After death character will produce its full 
effect. . . . The circumstances which in this 
life prevent vice, sin, wrongdoing, from in- 
flicting pain will not operate hereafter. There 
the evil mind will be exposed to its own ter- 
rible agency, and nothing, nothing will interfere 
between the transgressor and his own awakened 
conscience. ... In the present life we have the 
means of escaping, amusing, and forgetting 
ourselves. . . . Sleep is a function of our present 
animal frame ; but let not the transgressor 
anticipate this boon in the world of retribution 
before him. It may be, and he has reason to 
fear, that, in that state, repose will not weigh 
down his eyelids, that conscience will not 
slumber there, that day and night the same 
reproaching voice is to cry within, that unre- 
pented sin is to fasten its unrelaxing grasp on 
the ever-wakeful soul. ... It seems to me 

* Channing's Works (American Unitarian Association, 1872), 
vol. iv, pp. 162-165. 



120 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

probable that, in the future, the whole crea- 
tion will, through sin, be turned into a source 
of suffering, and will perpetually throw back the 
evil mind on its own transgressions. . . . One, 
and only one, evil can be carried from this world 
to the next, and that is the evil within us, 
moral evil, guilt, crime, ungoverned passion. 
The depraved mind, the memory of a wasted 
or ill-spent life, the character which has grown 
up under neglect of God's voice in his word 
and in the soul — this, this will go with us to 
stamp itself on our future frames, to darken 
our future being, to separate us like an im- 
passable gulf from our Creator and from pure 
and happy beings, to be as a consuming fire 
and an undying worm." 

Such were the words of the celebrated Dr. 
Channing. 

Rev. Orville Dewey, D.D., spoke * with 
great emphasis on this subject : 

" The great evil attending the common state- 
ments of this doctrine, I shall now venture to 
say, is not that they are too alarming. Men are 
not enough alarmed at the dangers of a sinful 
course. No men are; no men, though they 
sit under the most terrifying dispensation of 
preaching that ever was devised." 

Rev. Dr. W. G. Eliot, for many years pas- 

* Works, vol. ii, 70, 71. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 12 1 

tor of the Unitarian church in St. Louis,* 
said : 

" I would not lessen the fear which sin brings 
to the guilty man. It cannot be too great, so 
long as it is calm and rational, arising from our 
knowledge of the ruin which sin brings upon 
the soul now and the dread of what it may do 
hereafter. The terms used in the Scripture, 
though strongly figurative, are not unmeaning 
words. We may divest ourselves of the horror 
which their literal interpretation would con- 
vey, but we cannot set them aside. The 
Saviour, in adopting as the expression for the 
punishment of the wicked a word so full of 
terror as the valley of Hinnom, took the surest 
way of declaring that the sorrow of the sinful 
soul hereafter is beyond the power of tame 
words to describe. 

" Figurative language is used to convey 
greater strength and intensity of meaning. 
Are we yet so ignorant as not to know, so 
brutish as not to understand, that there is no 
torture of these frail sinews, no agony which 
can be brought on this crumbling body, so 
dreadful as the rising of an abused conscience 
to assert its stern dominion over the guilty 
soul? ... If we wished to picture to our- 

* Discourses on the Doctrines of Christianity (American 
Unitarian Association, 1873), pp. 162, 163. 



122 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

selves the real climax of suffering, it would be 
to place the soul, not in outward fire, but in 
the midst of beauty and external delight, with 
this curse upon it — that neither day nor night 
should the serpent's teeth of remorse cease to 
gnaw and devour. That curse would convert 
all things into instruments of torture, and out- 
ward flames would not be wanting to increase 
the woe." 

Such are some of the vivid portrayals of the 
sufferings of the wicked in the state of retribu- 
tion by eminent representatives of modern lib- 
eral sentiment. 

4. No warrant for restorationism in the Bible. 
We now approach a phase of this subject about 
which there is more dispute ; I refer to the 
question of the endlessness of retribution. A 
large number of " liberalists," so called, who 
believe in future retribution, claim, neverthe- 
less, that it will not be endless, but that all 
souls will, after a time, be recovered to holiness 
and heaven. 

A part of this class, however, acknowledge 
that there is no warrant in the Bible for any 
such hope of recovery. I present three remark- 
able testimonies of this class: 

In a statement of faith by the American 
Unitarian Association, in 1853, we find the fol- 
lowing : 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 12 3 

" It is our firm conviction that the final res- 
toration of all is not revealed in the Scriptures, 
but that the ultimate fate of the impenitent 
wicked is left enshrouded in impenetrable ob- 
scurity so far as the total declarations of the 
sacred writings are concerned ; " and yet they 
go on to say that they nevertheless " hold to 
the doctrine of the final universality of salva- 
tion as a consistent speculation of the reason 
and a strong belief of the heart. " " Those of 
us who believe (as a large majority of us do) 
in the final recovery of all souls, therefore, can- 
not emphasize it in the foreground of their 
preaching as a sure part of Christianity, but 
only elevate it in the background of their sys- 
tem as a glorious hope," etc. 

Rev. T. Starr King, in a discourse delivered 
in the Hollis Street Church, Boston, in 1858, 
made the following frank confession : 

" I freely say that I do not find the doctrine 
of the ultimate salvation of all souls clearly 
stated in any text or in any discourse that has 
been reported from the lips of Christ. I do 
not think we can fairly maintain that the final 
restoration of all men is a prominent and ex- 
plicit doctrine of the four gospels. We need- 
lessly narrow the grounds of opposition to 
sacrificial orthodoxy by attacking it from such 
a position/* 



124 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

But he says that he thinks that the doctrine 
of eternal punishment is opposed to the prin- 
ciples of Jesus, as he construes them, and he 
also says that " this doctrine is, to my mind, 
dreadful and monstrous — at war with our con- 
stitutional instincts of justice and charity." 
The ground of his opposition to it is his own 
heart. 

Rev. Theodore Parker, in a response to an 
inquiry of Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D.D., in 
1858, made the following acknowledgment: 

u To me it is quite clear that Jesus Christ 
taught the doctrine of eternal damnation, if 
the evangelists — the first three, I mean — are to 
be treated as inspired. I can understand his 
language in no other way." But he then adds 
that he rejects the doctrine, nevertheless, " be- 
cause it is so revolting to the humane and 
moral feelings of our nature." 

5. No hope on philosophical grounds. Can 
the final recovery of all souls, then, be expected 
on philosophical grounds? is the question which 
remains. 

If so, then it must be through one of three 
methods : (1) Because punishment is reforma- 
tory ; or (2) as a triumph of almighty love ; or 
(3) as a triumph of almighty power. 

Eminent thinkers have conceded that there 
is no hope from either of these sources. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 12 5 

1. As to the effect of punishment, Hon. Ed- 
mund Burke said : " The infliction of penalty 
has no tendency to reform the guilty." 

Rev. F. H. Hedge, D.D., in the Christian 
Examiner* said : 

" It does not appear that punishment in this 
world has always the effect, or has in the ma- 
jority of cases the effect, to reform the sinner; 
contrariwise, it is notorious that men continue 
to sin and suffer to the day of their death. What 
authority have we for supposing that this proc- 
ess is arrested hereafter, or for not supposing 
that the sinner will go on sinning and suffering 
everlastingly, or till evil becomes so predom- 
inant in the soul as utterly to quench its moral 
life, and conscious suffering ends in everlasting 
death? Who shall say that sin, once estab- 
lished, may not grow to be supreme and in- 
eradicable; that the habit of transgression con- 
tracted in this world, and confirmed by every 
fresh transgression, may not become a neces- 
sity of nature, strong as fate and deep as life ? " 

2. As to the triumph of almighty love, Dr. 

F. H. Hedge says this theory " supposes a 

too forcible interference of almighty love in the 

normal processes of the human soul, bringing 

the divine into self-collision. " It " assumes an 

inevitable triumph of self-recovery, a fatality 

* July, 1859, pp. 104, 105. 
9 



126 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

of goodness in man which seems to be based 
on no analysis of human nature, which cer- 
tainly is not warranted by any mundane ex- 
perience, and whose only voucher, so far as we 
can see, is a brave hope which, however hon- 
orable to those who cherish it, is of no great 
use in the critical investigation of the sub- 
ject. . . . There are some to whom the very 
attractiveness of such a doctrine may seem a 
sufficient warrant of its truth. We have no 
wish to disturb their faith ; but this ground of 
conviction, however influential in private ex- 
perience, is hardly available at the bar of crit- 
ical inquiry." 

Rev. William G. Eliot, D.D. * said : 
u Although there are some hints given of a 
final restoration of all things, and although our 
belief in the paternal goodness of God seems to 
lead to the same result, yet there are obvious 
difficulties in the way. By the nature of the 
soul, its return to goodness must be voluntary. 
It cannot be compelled, even for its own benefit, 
without a destruction of its best capacities. 

" The same voluntary resistance to God 
which is begun here may therefore continue 
through unknown ages, and we have no right 
to expect that God will ever impose upon us a 

* Doctrines of Christianity (published by American Uni- 
tarian Association, 1873), p. 166. 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 127 

necessity of being good. It is therefore a 
fearful risk which we run in suffering ourselves 
to become more and more hardened in sin. 
We do not know how far the capacity of good- 
ness may die. We do not know but that we 
may separate ourselves so far from God as to 
make our return impossible. Such thoughts 
are well calculated to awaken fear and trembling. 
The immortal soul is not to be trifled with, 
and those who bury it under sin are incurring 
a risk greater, perhaps,than we can understand. " 

In another place (page 164), after saying that 
there is a seeming inconsistency between end- 
less retribution and the benevolence of God, 
he adds : " But, on the other hand, we should 
remember that our knowledge of the divine 
attributes, and of the real claims of justice and 
mercy, is very limited. God seeth not as man 
seeth, for he sees the whole, and man only a 
part. It may therefore appear that many things 
which seem to us inconsistent with God's love 
are, in fact, its most perfect exercise." 

3. This question remains, Will all souls be 
recovered to virtue and heaven by the trium- 
phant exercise of almighty power ? 

A writer in the Christian Examiner* said : 

" We cannot imagine anything like compul- 
sion in one mind acting upon another. We 
*July, 1830, pp. 397, 398. 



128 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

cannot make our child receive knowledge. 
We can use compulsion upon his body ; we 
can bind him to his book ; but it is evident 
that compulsion cannot reach the mind. The 
difficulty is that men have felt as if moral 
power were no power at all ; as if to deny that 
God acts on men by compulsion w r ere the same 
thing as taking his sovereignty away. But 
our ideas of divine power should at least be 
borrowed from the highest human power we 
know. We accordingly find that the energy 
God exerts upon the human mind is different 
from that he exerts upon the senseless elements 
of nature. We find that in Christianity, called 
' the power of God/ he employs argument, in- 
ducement, and persuasion, which, men are just 
beginning to discover, are the most stupendous 
forces which can be brought to bear upon the 
mind, and yet exert no more compulsion to 
bend it in one direction or another than the 
moonlight shadow across the brook exerts to 
stop the flowing of the waters. We would 
speak reverently of the divine perfections. All 
we say is that we can conceive of no pow r er 
w T hich can break up this order of nature ; no 
power which can make him rest from labor 
who has refused to labor; no power which can 
make him who has refused to be holy enjoy 
that happiness which nothing but holiness 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 1 29 

brings. These things seem to be no subjects 
of power." 

Rev. F. H. Hedge, D.D., said : 

" The most distinguished of American phi- 
lanthropists, with large experience with human 
nature and reformatory discipline, expressed to 
us, in a recent conversation, the conviction that 
some natures are beyond the reach of moral 
influence — proof against all discipline — moral 
incurables. What reason to expect a moral 
revolution in such characters hereafter? If 
any derived from the nature of the human 
soul, let psychology declare it. The divine 
mercy? It is easy to talk of divine mercy, 
but the question is here of divine power. 
The question is of possibility — whether omnip- 
otence itself can reform such characters with- 
out so violating their idiosyncrasy, without so 
traversing their normal developments, as in 
effect to destroy their identity, and whether it 
would not better comport with divine economy 
to substitute at once another soul. A conver- 
sion which, instead of developing a native good, 
should impose a foreign one, would not be a 
reformation, but a metakitzosis, a transubstanti- 
ation. But we are supposing a case in which 
there is no good to be developed, if not a case 
of entire depravity — the existence of such cases 
may be denied — yet a case in which the will is 



130 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

irrecoverably divorced from good and bent on 
evil. Schiller describes the hero of ' The Rob- 
bers ' by saying that he would not pray, if once 
so resolved, though God should appeal to him in 
person with the offer of immediate heavenly 
bliss. We fancy this conceit expresses a possi- 
bility of human nature. We suspect that Mil- 
ton's Satan is no vain imagination — that the 
soul may arrive at a point of antagonism, where 
the pride of selfhood shall resist all appeals, 
and a self-centered willfulness shall say, ' Evil, 
be thou my good/ When that period is reached 
we can see no remedy, no way of restoration 
that would not compromise the soul's integrity. 
Yet even those cases are scarcely more hope- 
less than those of w r eak and unstable souls, 
swift to repent, and equally swift to transgress 
anew, whose existence oscillates between con- 
trition and indulgence. The moral influences 
which recoil from the solid resistance of the 
former character glide infructuous from the 

smooth facility of these. 

........ 

" God will have all men to be saved in the 
sense in which he wills that all fruit germs shall 
become fruits, and all human embryos well- 
formed, healthy men and women. But this 
destination is not always accomplished ; re- 
sistance or defect in the stuff, collision of forces, 



FOUR LEADING VITAL DOCTRINES. 131 

or what not, produces abortions in the one 
case ; and defect or contradiction of the will 
may produce them in the other. The world of 
souls may have its failures as well as the world 
of forms/' 

Thus we see that each of these four great 
doctrines, which stand as interior columns of the 
Christian system, have been vindicated by the 
testimonies of men who have at times stood op- 
posed to them. 



Ube flnnermost Central Column of tbe 
Cbristtan System IDinofcateo b^ Its 
Bnemtes. 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 35 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE INNERMOST CENTRAL COLUMN OF THE 
CHRISTIAN SYSTEM VINDICATED BY ITS ENE- 
MIES. 

Still penetrating within the goodly pre- 
cincts of the Christian temple, we next concen- 
trate upon its most vital center, upon which, 
more than upon anything else, the past of 
Christianity has depended and the future must 
depend. 

This central column is the soul-satisfying 
power of Christianity, that Christianity won- 
derfully satisfies the spiritual necessities of our 
being. 

So fundamental is this truth that without it 
Christianity would never be desired. We 
would have only Christianity with Christianity 
left out. It would be like the play of Hamlet 
with the part of Hamlet left out. 

But if this fact be proved, that Christianity 
wonderfully satisfies the human soul in its 
deepest needs, then, whatever of criticism or 
opposition it may encounter, it can neither be 
put down nor outgrown, but it will live and 
triumph forever. 



136 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED, 

All this we propose to stake upon the ac- 
knowledgments of our adversaries, and those 
who have stood apart from any profession of 
the Christian religion. I ask attention to two 
classes of acknowledgments, one general, and 
the other specific. 

I. We have the acknowledgments of skep- 
tics that the Bible satisfies the spiritual necessi- 
ties, and that, in this regard, no other book 
can equal it. 

Rousseau, our first witness, was a man of 
varied moods, vibrating between the most 
radical skepticism and a quasi assent to the 
ethics of Christianity. In one of his letters to 
Deleyre, a disciple of Diderot, he said : 

** I shudder to witness your continual at- 
tempts against religion. Dear Deleyre, dis- 
trust your tendency to satire. Learn, at all 
events, to reverence religion ; humanity itself 
demands it. The great, the rich, the happy, 
would be delighted to hear that there is no 
God ; but the expectation of another life is, in 
this, the only consolation of the commonalty 
and the afflicted. What cruelty to exclude 
them from that hope ! " * 

Thomas Carlyle, whose peculiar transcenden- 
tal and pantheistic attitude is well known, said 

* Boyle Lectures, by Rev. William Harness, 1821, vol. ii, 
p. 148. 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 37 

of the Bible : " In the poorest cottages are 
books ; is one book, wherein for several thou- 
sands of years the spirit of man has found light 
and nourishment, and an interpreting response 
to whatever is deepest in him ; wherein still, 
to this day, for the eye that will look well, the 
mystery of existence reflects itself, if not re- 
solved, yet revealed, and prophetically em- 
blemed ; if not to the satisfying of the outward 
sense, yet to the opening of the inward sense, 
which is the far grander result." 

That brilliant writer, Matthew Arnold, whose 
freedom of criticism ranks him among the de- 
structive rationalists of our day, makes a very 
remarkable acknowledgment as to the value of 
the Bible in meeting the vital needs of the soul.* 
He says : " To the Bible men will return because 
they cannot do without it ; because happiness 
is our being's end and aim, and happiness be- 
longs to righteousness, and righteousness is 
revealed in the Bible. For this simple reason 
men will return to the Bible, just as a man who 
tried to give up food, thinking it was a vain 
thing, and that he could do without it, would 
return to food ; or a man who tried to give up 
sleep, thinking it was a vain thing, and he could 
do without it, would return to sleep. ,, 

* Literature and Dogma (London, Smith, Elder & Co., 
1873), p. 34°- 



138 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

In his Last Essays Mr. Arnold said that the 
precepts of Christianity, if obeyed, will bring 
the most complete happiness in this world, with- 
out reference to the future world. Hence he 
thinks Christianity has a future. 

Near the close of his Literature and Dogma* 
Mr. Arnold says : " Finally, and above all. As 
for the right inculcation of righteousness we 
need the inspiring words of Israel's love for it, 
that is, we need the Bible ; so for the right in- 
culcation of the method and secret of Jesus we 
need the epieikeia, the sweet reasonableness of 
Jesus. That is, in other words again, we need 
the Bible ; for only through the Bible records 
of Jesus can we get at his epieikeia. Even in 
these records it is and can be presented but 
imperfectly; but only by reading and rereading 
the Bible can we get at it at all." 

u It is said that the late Charles Reade, of 
England, the eminent novelist, was led to study 
the Old Testament by a remark of the late fa- 
mous Matthew Arnold, the remark being, ac- 
cording to a writer in the Andover Review, in 
these words : * The old Bible is getting to be to 
us literary men of England a sealed book. We 
may think we know it. We were taught it at 
home. We heard it read in church. Perhaps 
we can quote some verse, or even passage ; 

*P. 378 (London edition, Smith, Elder & Co., 1873). 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 39 

but we really know very little of it. I wish, 
Reade, that you would take up the Old Testa- 
ment and go through it as though every page 
of it were altogether new to you — as though 
you had never read a line of it before. I think 
it will astonish you.' Mr. Reade did so. He 
entered upon the task with such a zeal as char- 
acterized his other work. The result was he 
not only became astonished at his discoveries, 
but the study led to his conversion. He 
opened his heart to the truths and lessons of 
the Old Testament and found that they were 
full of a mighty, convincing power, before which 
he humbly bowed, and by which he was brought 
into the kingdom of which the prophets fore- 
told with graphic interest and eloquence. And 
there are many to-day who, if they would de- 
voutly search those ancient Scriptures, would 
find them the power of God, unto salvation/' * 
Professor Huxley, whose materialistic atti- 
tude will shield him from any suspicion of bias 
for the Christian religion or its books, in an 
address upon education, said : " I have always 
been strongly in favor of secular education, in 
the sense of education without theology ; but 
I must confess I have been no less seriously 
perplexed to know by what practical measures 
the religious feeling, which is the essential 

*0. H. Wetherbe, in The Presbyterian. 



140 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the 
present utterly chaotic state of opinion on 
these matters, without the use of the Bible. 
The pagan moralists lack life and color ; and 
even the noble Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, is too 
high and refined for an ordinary child. Take 
the Bible as a whole ; make the severest de- 
duction which fair criticism can dictate for 
shortcomings and positive errors ; eliminate, 
as a sensible lay teacher would do, if left to 
himself, all that is not desirable for children to 
occupy themselves with, and there still re- 
mains in this old literature a vast residuum of 
moral grandeur. And then consider the great 
historical fact that for three centuries this 
book has been woven into the life of all that is 
best and noblest in English history ; that it 
has become the national epic of Britain, and 
is familiar to noble and simple, from John 
O'Groat's to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso 
were once to the Italians; that it is written in 
the noblest and purest English and abounds 
in exquisite beauties of a merely literary form ; 
and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind, 
who never left his village, to be ignorant of the 
existence of other countries and other civiliza- 
tions, and of a great past stretching back to 
the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the 
world. By the study of what other books 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 141 

could children be so much humanized and 
made to feel that each figure in that vast his- 
torical procession fills, like themselves, but a 
momentary space in the interval between the 
two eternities? " 

Rev. Brooke Herford, after quoting the fore- 
going, added : " It is always refreshing to hear 
a word for religion or for the Bible from one 
who has not a particle of professional feeling 
or superstitious reverence for either. And this 
is a noteworthy word, that for conduct we need 
religion, and for religion we need the Bible. 
Here you have the whole thing in a nutshell." 

Theodore Parker has spoken and written 
some of the most bitter words against the 
Bible ; and yet, in his better moods, he 
penned one of the finest encomiums upon the 
Bible ever written, the chief value of which is 
its acknowledgment that the Bible meets the 
most vital and varied needs of the human 
soul. He said : 

" The Bible is read of a Sunday in all the 

thirty thousand pulpits of our land. In all 

the temples of Christendom is its voice lifted 

up week by week. The sun never sets on its 

gleaming page. It goes equally to the cottage 

of the plain man and the palace of the king. 

It is woven into the literature of the scholar 

and colors the talk of the street. The bark of 
10 



142 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

the merchant cannot sail the seas without it ; 
no ship of war goes to the conflict but the 
Bible is there. It enters men's closets, mingles 
in all the grief and cheerfulness of life. The 
affianced maiden prays God in Scripture for 
strength in her new duties; men are married 
by Scripture. The Bible attends them in 
their sickness ; when the fever of the world is 
on them the aching head finds a softer pillow 
if its leaves lie underneath. The mariner, es- 
caping from shipwreck, clutches this first of his 
treasures, and keeps it sacred to God. It goes 
with the peddler in his crowded pack, cheers 
him at eventide when he sits down dusty and 
fatigued, and brightens the freshness of his 
morning face. It blesses us when we are born, 
gives names to half Christendom, rejoices with 
us, has sympathy with our mourning, tempers 
our grief to finer issues. It is the better part 
of our sermons. It lifts man above himself; 
our best of uttered prayers are in its storied 
speech, wherewith our fathers and the patri- 
archs prayed. The timid man, about awakening 
from this dream of life, looks through the glass 
of Scripture, and his eye grows bright ; he does 
not fear to stand alone, to tread the way, un- 
known and distant, to take the death angel by 
the hand and bid farewell to wife and babes and 
home. Men rest on this their dearest hopes." 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 143 

Mr. Lecky* accounts for the triumph of 
Christianity in the old Roman world on the 
ground that it peculiarly met the spiritual 
needs of the soul. He says : 

" No other religion had ever combined so 
many distinct elements of power and attrac- 
tion. Unlike the Jewish religion, it was bound 
by no local ties, and was equally adapted to 
every nation and to every class. Unlike 
stoicism, it appealed in the strongest manner 
to the affections, and offered all the charm of 
a sympathetic worship. Unlike the Egyptian 
religion, it united with its distinctive teaching 
a pure and noble system of ethics, and proved 
itself capable of realizing it in action. It pro- 
claimed, amid a vast movement of social and 
national amalgamation, the universal brother- 
hood of mankind. Amid the softening influ- 
ence of philosophy and civilization it taught 
the supreme sanctity of love. To the slave, 
who had never before exercised so large an 
influence over Roman religious life, it was the 
religion of the suffering and the oppressed. 
To the philosopher it was at once the echo of 
the highest ethics of the later Stoics, and the 
expansion of the best teaching of the school of 
Plato. . . . To a world that had grown very 
weary, gazing on the cold, passionless grandeur 
* History of European Morals, vol. i, pp. 412, 413. 



144 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

which Cato realized, and which Lucan sang, it 
presented an ideal of compassion and of love — 
an ideal destined for centuries to draw around 
it all that was greatest, as well as all that was 
noblest, upon earth — a Teacher who could 
w r eep by the sepulcher of his friend and who was 
touched with the feeling of our infirmities. To 
a world, in fine, distracted by hostile creeds and 
colliding philosophies, it taught its doctrines,not 
as a human speculation, but as a divine revela- 
tion, authenticated much less by reason than by 
faith. ' With the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness ; ' ' He that doeth the will of 
my Father will know of the doctrine, whether 
it be of God/ . . . The chief cause of its suc- 
cess was the congruity of its teaching with the 
spiritual nature of mankind. It was because 
it was true to the moral sentiments of the age, 
because it represented faithfully the supreme 
type of excellence to which men were then 
tending, because it corresponded with their 
religious wants and aims and emotions, be- 
cause the whole spiritual being could then ex- 
pand and expatiate under its influence, that it 
planted its roots so deeply in the hearts of 
men." 

I have thus presented frank acknowledg- 
ments from six prominent gentlemen in the 
highest ranks of skeptical thought — Rousseau, 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 145 

Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Huxley, Theodore 
Parker, and Lecky — that the Bible meets the 
most vital needs of the human soul. These 
are all general statements of what Christianity 
does. 

It is now pertinent to inquire for something 
more specific. What crucial tests can be cited 
which will demonstrate that Christianity affords 
this wonderful satisfaction to the soul? This 
brings us to notice other testimonies, as: 

II. Crucial tests of the soul-satisfying power 
of Christianity, our enemies being judges. 

We ask, then, what are the times of special 
need in human experience, the phases of life 
in which human souls are most painfully and 
severely tried? 

1. We are all familiar with the misfortunes, 
reverses, and bereavements of this life, and the 
supreme ordeal of all human experiences, the 
death season. Does the Christian religion 
meet the soul's necessities in these trying ex- 
periences ? And to what an extent have men 
professedly outside of Christianity acknowl- 
edged that Christianity is adequate to these 
necessities? 

It is not difficult to demonstrate that in 
these times of need, when other systems show 
their poverty and fail, that Christianity satisfies 
and achieves her brightest triumphs. 



146 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Some of the more courageous skeptics have 
attempted to push their theories to practical 
results, in order to show that their systems are 
capable of meeting the deeper needs of hu- 
manity, but their efforts have only led to con- 
strained or implied confessions. In October, 
1872, a writer in the Westminster Review un- 
dertook to estimate the ability of the current 
materialistic philosophy to console and elevate 
human life. Its incentives and comforts to 
cultivated minds were portrayed with feeble 
vanishing touches ; the stern necessities of 
humanity were overlooked, and the article 
closed with seemingly conscious dissatisfac- 
tion. 

The materialistic theories of Schopenhauer 
and Hartmann would eclipse the universe. 
Dr. Strauss lived to see the unsatisfactory 
character of his theories, as is evident from his 
Ein Bekenntniss (A Confession). 

Thoreau, in one of his peculiar moods, 
complained of the failure of his pantheistic 
worship to satisfy the deepest needs of his con- 
sciousness, and in plaintive lines expressed his 
sadness : 

"Amid such boundless wealth without, 
I only still am poor within : 
The birds have served their summer out, 
But still my spring does not begin." 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 147 

Full of significance are also these lines of 
Matthew Arnold : 

" The sea of faith 

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 

But now I only hear 

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 

Retreating to the breath 

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear 

And naked shingles of the world. 

Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another! for the world, which seems 

To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 

And we are here, as on a darkling plain, 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 

Where ignorance armies close by night." 

Frederick Harrison, once reckoned as a dis- 
ciple of Comte, has forcibly shown the inad- 
equacy of the agnosticism of Spencer, and 
also of Comte's religion of humanity. 

" In the hour of pain, danger, and death," 
says Mr. Harrison, " can anyone think of the 
Unknowable, hope anything of the Unknow- 
able, or find any consolation therein ? . . . A 
mother wrung with agony for the loss of her 
child, or the wife crushed by the death of her 
children's father, or the helpless and the op- 
pressed, the poor and the needy, men, women, 



148 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

and children, in sorrow, doubt, and want, long- 
ing for something to comfort them and to guide 
them, something to believe in, to hope for, to 
love and to worship, they come to our philos- 
opher and they say, ' Your men of science 
have routed our priests and have silenced 
our old teachers. What religious faith do 
you give us in its place?' And the phi- 
losopher replies (his full heart bleeding for 
them), and he says, ' Think of the Unknow- 
able ! ' The same objection is open to Comte's 
religion of humanity. It is no consolation in 
the hour of death to think of the Impersonal 
Humanity/' 

George Eliot never wholly rid herself of the 
vital truths of her early religious training. In 
her earlier revulsion, which was very radical, she 
was conscious of the hollowness and insuffi- 
ciency of infidelity, and said, "It is the quackery 
of infidelity to suppose that it has a nostrum 
for all mankind, and to say to all and singular, 
1 Swallow my opinions, and you shall be whole.' ' 
A little further on in life, while in the heyday 
of her unbelief, she wrote to Miss Hennel that 
she should like to work out a paper " on the 
superiority of the consolations of philosophy 
to those of so-called religion." Still later she 
distrusted this substitute, and shrank from all 
attempts to unsettle the religious beliefs of 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 149 

men. In a letter to Madame Bodichou, in 
1862, she said : 

" Pray don't ever ask me again not to rob a 
man of his religious belief, as if you thought 
my mind tended to such robbery. I have too 
profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies 
in all sincere faith to have any negative propa- 
gandism in me. In fact, I have very little sym- 
pathy with freethinkers as a class, and have 
lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious 
doctrines." 

In the last part of her life The Imitation of 
Christ was one of her favorite books, and the 
Bible, also, was a part of her daily reading. 

A story is told of Lepaux, a member of the 
French Directory, that with much thought and 
study he had invented a new religion, to be 
called " Theophilanthropy," a kind of organ- 
ized Rousseauism, and that, being disappointed 
in its not being readily approved and adopted, 
he complained to Talleyrand of the difficulty 
he found in introducing it. 

" I am not surprised," said Talleyrand, " at 
the difficulty you find in your effort. It is no 
easy matter to introduce a new religion. But 
there is one thing I would advise you to do, 
and then perhaps you might succeed." 

" What is it? what is it?" asked the other, 
with eagerness. 



150 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

u It is this," said Talleyrand, " go and be 
crucified, then be buried, and then rise again 
on the third day, and then go on working 
miracles, raising the dead, and healing all 
manner of diseases, and casting out devils, and 
then it is possible that you might accomplish 
your end!'' And the philosopher, crestfallen 
and confounded, went away silent. 

Mhegard, professor of philosophy in the Uni- 
versity of Copenhagen, was long an apostle of 
skepticism. In the introduction of the second 
edition of one of his works he makes a notable 
confession : 

"The experience of life, its sufferings and 
griefs, have shaken my soul and have broken 
the foundation upon which I formerly thought 
I could build. Full of faith in the sufficiency 
of science, I thought to have found in it a sure 
refuge from all the contingencies of life. This 
illusion is vanished ; when the tempest came 
which plunged me in sorrow, the moorings, 
the cable of science, broke like thread. Then 
I seized upon the help which many before me 
have laid hold of. I sought and found peace 
in God. Since then I have certainly not aban- 
doned science, but I have assigned to it another 
place in my life." 

Heine, a distinguished writer of rare origi- 
nality and force, a physician in Berlin, and well 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. I 5 I 

known as a ribald skeptic, lost very heavily by 
the bankruptcy of a mercantile house. A 
friend, Hufeland, meeting him a few days 
after, expressed sympathy. Heine replied, " I 
had rather you had not reminded me of it ; 
for, thank God, I have got over it-" " How 
did you manage that?" rejoined Hufeland. 
Heine answered : " Well, I was unable to for- 
get it; thought upon it night and day. All 
my money, earned so painfully, and lost in a 
moment ! Even my poor innocent patients 
suffered, for my thoughts were wandering. 
My domestic pleasures vanished ; my good 
wife, otherwise so cheerful, hung her head ; we 
sat opposite each other at the table dumb and 
sad ; our children, that had been full of joy, 
looked on with timid fear. I felt that this 
could not and must not continue. The money 
was gone, and with it we had lost our peace. I, 
poor worm of earth, unable to come out of 
this distress, took refuge with the Almighty. 
I hurried to my bedroom, closed the door 
behind, and fell on my knees to pray with my 
whole heart that strength and courage and joy 
and rest might be restored to me. Then I felt 
as if God had appeared to me and said, ' Thou 
art a poor minister's son, and I have blessed 
thee in thy calling, so that thou art now a 
famous man. For years I have suffered thee 



152 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

to sport with the money thou hast lost. Have 
I not the keys of all thy treasures ? And can 
I not far more than replace thy loss ? Be again 
of good courage, and promise that thou wilt 
go joyfully back to thy calling/ And I prom- 
ised, and wife and children were again cheerful, 
and I forgot the heaviness. I have got over it, 
and am once more happy with my God. Prayer 
has done this." 

The late Dr. Tyng says : " I once called to 
visit a dying lady in Philadelphia. I had knelt 
often in prayer with her. Her husband was an 
atheist, an English atheist, a cold-hearted 
English atheist. There is no such being be- 
side him on the face of the globe. That was 
her husband. On the day on which that sweet 
Christian woman died she put her hand under 
her pillow and took out a beautiful, well-worn, 
tear-moistened Bible. She called her husband, 
and he came, and she said, ■ Do you know this 
little book?' And he answered, * It is your 
Bible/ And she replied: ' It is my Bible; it 
has been everything to me ; it has converted, 
strengthened, cheered, and saved me ; now I 
am going to Him who gave it to me, and I 
shall want it no more ; open your hands.' And 
she put it between his two hands and pressed 
them together about it. * My dear husband, 
do you know what I am doing ? ' ' Yes, dear, 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 53 

you are giving me your Bible.' ' No, darling, 
I am giving you your Bible, and God has sent 
me to give you this sweet book before I die. 
Now put it in your bosom. Will you keep it 
there ? Will you read it, for me ? ' 'I will, 
my dear/ 

" I placed," said Dr. Tyng, " this dear lady 
dead in the tomb behind my church. Perhaps 
three weeks afterward that husband came to 
my study, weeping profusely. ' O, my friend,* 
said he, * my friend, I have found what she 
meant — it is my Bible, every word of it was 
written for me. I read it over night by night; 
I bless God it is my Bible. Will you take me 
into your church where she was ? ' i With all my 
heart/ And that once proud, worldly, hostile 
man, hating this blessed Bible, came, with no 
arguments, with no objections, with no diffi- 
culties suggested, with no questions to unravel, 
but binding this word on his heart of memory 
and love. It was God's message of direct sal- 
vation to his soul, as direct as if there was not 
another Bible in Philadelphia and an angel 
from heaven had brought him this." 

Rev. J. M. Buckley, LL.D., in the Christian 
Advocate, May 30, 1895, says: "A few years 
ago we read a beautiful story, which we here 
reproduce : 

"'The following story is told of Littr<§, the 



154 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

great French savant. Legouv6 says that shortly 
after Littre's daughter was born he(Littre) said 
to his wife : " My dear, you are a good Christian. 
Bring up your daughter in the ways of religion 
and piety which you have always followed ; but 
I must exact one condition, and that is that 
when she is fifteen years of age you will bring 
her to me. I will then explain my views to 
her, and she can choose for herself." The 
mother accepted the condition. Years rolled 
on, the fifteenth birthday of the child soon 
came, and the mother entered her husband's 
study. " You remember what you said to me, 
and what I promised, " said she. " Your daugh- 
ter is fifteen years old to-day. She is now 
ready to listen to you with all the respect and 
confidence due to the best of fathers. Shall 
I bring her in ? " " Why, certainly/' replied 
Littre. " But for what special reason ? To ex- 
plain to her my views ? O no, my dear ; no, no. 
You have made of her a good, affectionate, 
simple, straightforward, bright, and happy 
creature. Happy, yes ; that is the word that 
in a pure being describes every virtue. And 
you fancy that I would cover all that happiness 
and purity with my ideas ! Pshaw ! my ideas 
are good enough for me. Who can say that 
they would be good for her? Who can 
say that they would not destroy or at least 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 55 

damage your work? Bring her in, so that I 
may bless you in her presence for all that you 
have done for her, and so that she may love 
you more than ever." 

" ' " I, too/' added Legouve, at the close of 
his little anecdote, " have around me believers 
whom I love, and I would consider myself 
a criminal if I troubled their religious convic- 
tions with my doubts and my objections, 
especially when I know that they find in those 
convictions nothing but joy, consolation, and 
virtue." ' " 

Dr. Buckley adds the following attestation : 

" Legouve is a member of the French Acad- 
emy, to which he was admitted in 1856. He 
was born February 14, 1807; is a famous author 
of novels, plays, and poems, and celebrated as 
a lecturer. Some of his plays had great popu- 
larity, the famous Rachel succeeding in one, 
and Ristori equally in an Italian version of 
another. He is the author of many very pop- 
ular works. 

" Maximilien Paul Emile Littre was born in 
Paris, February 1, 1801 ; was a student of 
medicine, and a voluminous writer, becoming 
very conspicuous by a learned edition of 
Hippocrates in ten volumes. The first volume 
procured his admission to the Academy of 
Inscriptions. In politics he was an advocate 



156 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

of democracy for France, and for twenty years 
was one of the writers for the NationeL After 
a few months' experience he withdrew once for 
all ' to his studious privacy/ In 1871 he was 
elected to the National Assembly, but he never 
spoke there. The greatest work he ever pub- 
lished was a magnificent Dictionnaire de la 
Langage Fra?igaise; this he worked upon alto- 
gether thirty-one years. In religion he was a 
positivist, and translated Strauss's Life of 
Christ, which transforms the whole into myth. 
He is accredited with having caused the name 
of God and other religious details and refer- 
ences to be expunged from the ritual of the 
Masonic fraternity; and this expunction ac- 
counts in large part for the animosity of the 
Pope of Rome to Freemasonry. 

" Many who read these words will remember 
the excitement produced when Littre, in June, 
1873, was admitted to the French Academy. 
The Bishop of Orleans, the celebrated M. Du- 
panloup, protested against his admission by 
withdrawing from his seat in the Academy, 
which gave rise to an extensive discussion. 
Littre died in Paris June 2, 1881. He is said 
to have become a Catholic before he died, but 
on this we have no information. 

" After reading that story many times — in 
fact, committing it to memory from the mere 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 57 

repetition of the readings — we wondered 
whether it were true. In Legouve we had 
felt considerable interest because of his work, 
La Lectur en Action, which has been of great 
use to us in many ways. As we were painfully 
translating it an edition appeared in English, 
published by a Philadelphia firm, under the 
title, The Art of Reading. The notes made the 
book exceedingly valuable, and the suggestions 
of Legouve penetrated to the marrow of the 
subject. 

"When Dr. Gibson, of France, was in this 
country, we asked him if Legouve was still 
living. He said that he believed he was. 
After a delay of about a year, often recalling 
this story, we addressed him a note, of which 
the following is an English translation : 

" 'Dear Sir: Pardon one who has read all that 
you have written that is translated into Eng- 
lish if he asks you whether the inclosed is true. 
Many things that are floating about have no 
foundation, or are sufficiently distorted to 
make it necessary to have the authority of the 
person named in the narration before believing 
them. You will oblige me greatly if you will 
answer this question/ 

" The following came in reply : ' This history 

is absolutely correct/ 

" Here are philosophic agnostics, the first, 
11 



158 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

learned to the last degree of an enormous brain 
capacity ; the other, informed of the whole cir- 
cle of fashionable life, art, and literature, and 
refined to the most exquisite point. They 
estimate the gospels as the source of joy, con- 
solation, and virtue. 

" Let this tribute be preserved to bring to 
shame or silence those who, as brute beasts, 
speak evil of the things they understand not/' 

Such acknowledgments imply that Chris- 
tianity is a living, vital power in the sorest 
emergencies of this life ; that its Founder is not 
dead, but the living ascended Redeemer, of 
whom Renan, in one of his better moods, was 
constrained to exclaim, " Thy divinity is estab- 
lished. ... A thousand times more living, a 
thousand times more loved, since thy death, 
than during thy pilgrimage here below, thou 
wilt become to such a degree the corner stone 
of humanity that to tear thy name from this 
world would be to shake it from its very foun- 
dations.^ 

So necessary is Jesus confessed to be to this 
world's essential life in its trying vicissitudes. 

2. But the death season is the supreme ordeal 
of all human experiences. This transition 
period between the two worlds is universally 
regarded as the supreme testing time. Hence, 
in courts of justice great weight is attached to 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 59 

declarations made by persons near death, due 
discrimination being made as to the mental 
condition of the departed. 

Consider the tacit admissions of the truth 
of Christianity made by men of the world in 
allusions to departed friends. How often do 
biographers and friends of the dead labor to 
show that their departed friends were Chris- 
tians ! Hon. Daniel Webster, personally not 
a " professing Christian," in his eulogy upon 
that distinguished New England lawyer, Hon. 
Jeremiah Mason, dwelt with great satisfaction 
upon the fact that Mr. Mason was a Christian, 
and more than once stated that Mr. Mason 
kept up family worship for many years. Hon. 
Rufus Choate's biographer improved every 
opportunity to show that biblical religion occu- 
pied Mr. Choate's thoughts or was favorably 
regarded by him. After the death of the great 
Humboldt efforts were made to prove that he 
was a Christian, although in his famous book 
Cosmos, in which he surveyed the whole realm 
of nature, the name of God was mentioned in 
only two or three instances. The friends of Hon. 
Thomas Jefferson, who, at least in his earlier 
life, was a skeptic of the radical French school 
(and, if he changed his views at a later period, 
came to be only a humanitarian, a Socinian of 
a low type), since his death have striven hard 



l6o CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

to make out that he was a Christian. His later 
writings have been closely searched, conversa- 
tions with contemporaries carefully reproduced, 
reminiscences gleaned, and all the scattered 
straws gathered,* to make out the case. How 
often, as pastors of churches, do we meet cases 
of friends trying to make out that dear de- 
parted ones were Christians, though they had 
never professed to be Christians ; some of them 
were profane, perhaps dissolute, and seldom 
attended upon public worship. Sometimes 
there has been gathered only a feeble straw of 
evidence, out of the last sickness, to make out 
the case. This has been industriously utilized. 

Why all this ? Why these desperate efforts 
to make it appear that departed friends were 
Christians ? Why not let them and their record 
pass without attempting to enroll them as Chris- 
tians? If there is no truth in Christianity, it is 
just as well to die outside of its fold as in it. 

I will tell you why. There is a latent con- 
viction that Christianity is true, and that to be 
a Christian improves a man's chances in the 
great hereafter. We have here a tacit acknowl- 
edgment that the Christian religion is a glorious 
reality, that Christianity alone can meet the 
deepest needs of the soul in that most impor- 
tant moment, when it is ushered into the pres- 

*See North American Review, i860, p. 115. 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. l6l 

ence of Him who sits upon the highest throne 
of authority in the universe, before whose bar 
ultimate appeals and final destinies are decided. 

Mr. Lecky, the distinguished philosophical 
and historical writer, of well-known freethinking 
habits, speaking of the triumphs of the evangel- 
ical movements generated under the Wesleys 
and Whitefield in the last century, says : 

" But the chief triumph of a religious move- 
ment is not to be found in its action upon 
large classes of the community, or within the 
noisy arena of politics. It is to be found rather 
in those spheres and moments of life which, 
beyond all others, are secluded from the eye 
of history. Every religion which is worthy of 
the name must provide some method of con- 
soling men in the first agonies of bereavement, 
some support in the extremes of pain and sick- 
ness, above all, some stay in the hour of death. 
It must operate not merely or mainly upon the 
strong and healthy reason, but also in the twi- 
light of the understanding, in the half-lucid 
intervals that precede death, when the imagina- 
tion is enfeebled and discolored by disease, when 
all the faculties are confused and dislocated, 
when all the buoyancy and hopefulness of na- 
ture are crushed. At such a time it is not suffi- 
cient for most men to rest upon a review of a 
well-spent life. Such a retrospect to all of us is 



1 62 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

too full of saddening and humiliating memories. 
It is an effort too great for the jaded mind. It 
can, at best, afford but a cold and languishing 
satisfaction amid the bitterness of death." 

Then, after speaking of the influence of 
Roman Catholicism in such moments by an 
absolution, which is dependent upon "com- 
plete submission to sacerdotal claims " — " the 
most formidable engine of religious tyranny 
that has ever been employed to disturb or sub- 
jugate the world M — he proceeds: 

" It is the glory of Protestantism, whenever 
it remains faithful to the spirit of its founders, 
that it has destroyed this engine. The evan- 
gelical teacher emphatically declares that the 
intervention of no human being, and of no 
human rite, is necessary in the hour of death. 
. . . The doctrine of justification by faith, 
which diverts the wandering mind from all 
painful and perplexing retrospect, concentrates 
the imagination on one sacred Figure, and per- 
suades the sinner that the sins of a life have 
in a moment been effaced, has enabled thou- 
sands to encounter death with perfect calm, or 
even with vivid joy, and has consoled innu- 
merable mourners at a time when all the 
commonplaces of philosophy would appear 
the idlest of sounds. 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 163 

" Historians, and even ecclesiastical histo- 
rians, are too apt to regard men simply in 
classes, or communities, or corporations, and 
to forget that the keenest of our sufferings, as 
well as the deepest of our joys, take place in 
those periods when we are most isolated from 
the movements of society. Whatever may 
be thought of the truth of the doctrine, 
no candid man will question its power in 
the house of mourning and in the hour of 
death. i The world/ wrote Wesley, ' may not 
like our Methodists and evangelical people, 
but the world cannot deny that they die 
well/"* 

An impressive illustration of the truth I am 
discussing came to my personal knowledge. I 
had it from the lips of the man himself, an 
avowed atheist, who came to the bedside of a 
dear sister, almost gone w r ith consumption. 
Taking him by the hand and pulling him down 
close to her, she asked, " Stephen, what can I 
do now?" Hesitating a moment, he replied, 
" Look to Jesus. He can save you." I asked 
him how he, a boasting atheist, came to reply 
thus. He answered, " I was indeed a professed 
atheist, but somehow I felt there was nothing 
else she could do." 

* England in the Eighteenth Century, by W. E. H. Lecky 
(D. Appleton & Co., 1878), ii, pp. 664, 665. 



164 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

So much in regard to the convictions of the 
living in regard to dying persons. 

I come next to the confessions of dying per- 
sons themselves. It has come to be a well- 
accepted fact that many skeptics of various 
classes, in the near prospect of death, have re- 
nounced their unbelief and sought the benefits 
of Christianity. 

Heine, to whose conversion I have referred, 
revised his literary productions, throwing out 
all aspersions upon the Christian religion. 
Before dying he said : 

" When we lie on our deathbed we become 
very gentle and tender-hearted, and willingly 
make peace with God and man. I confess I 
have scratched many and bitten many, and 
have been no lamb. But since I have stood in 
need of God's mercy I have made a truce with 
all my foes. Many beautiful poems which 
were directed against very high and very low 
persons are for that reason excluded from the 
present collection. Poems which contained in 
any degree personalities against Almighty God 
I have committed to the flames with the zeal 
of fear. It is better that the verses should 
burn than the versifier. Yes, I have made 
peace with the Creator as well as with the 
creature, to the great displeasure of my en- 
lightened friends, who reproach me for my 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 65 

relapse into the old superstition, as they are 
pleased to call my return to God. Others ex- 
press themselves with still bitterer intolerance. 
Atheism's convocation has pronounced its 
anathema over me, and there are certain fanat- 
ical priests of unbelief who would willingly 
place me on the rack to make me renounce my 
heterodoxy. Happily they have no instru- 
ments of torture at their command except their 
writings. But I will confess everything with- 
out torture. I have really returned to God, 
like the prodigal son, after feeding swine with 
the Hegelians for many years. The divine 
homesickness came upon me and drove me 
forth, through woods and over vales, over the 
dizziest mountain pathways of dialectic. On 
my way I found the god of the pantheists, but 
I could make nothing of him. " 

The examples of Voltaire and Paine are 
familiar. That they relented from their infi- 
delity before they died, although often disputed, 
is undoubtedly true, and that they alternately 
cursed and pleaded for mercy is also beyond 
successful dispute. I have been over and over 
the ground, and know well what Mr. Ingersoll 
and others have declared, but I believe that 
they came to the close of life as I have said ; 
and this can be demonstrated as fully as that 
Hon. Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel 



166 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

with Aaron Burr, or that George Washington 
died peacefully in his own home. 

" Some years ago an individual well known 
and highly respected in the religious world 
narrated in my hearing the following incident. 
In early life, while with a college companion he 
was making a tour on the Continent, at Paris, his 
friend was seized with an alarming illness. A 
physician of great celebrity was speedily sum- 
moned, who stated that the case was a critical 
one and that much would depend upon a 
minute attention to his directions. As there 
was no one at hand upon whom they could 
place much reliance, he was requested to recom- 
mend some confidential and experienced nurse. 
He mentioned one, but added, * You may 
think yourself happy indeed should you be 
able to secure her services ; but she is so much 
in request among the higher circles here that 
there is little chance of finding her disengaged/ 
The narrator at once ordered his carriage, went 
to her residence, and much to his satisfaction 
found her at home. He briefly stated his er- 
rand and requested her immediate attendance. 
' But before I consent to accompany you, 
permit me, sir/ said she, * to ask you a single 
question. Is your friend a Christian ?' ' Yes/ 
he replied, * he is indeed a Christian in the 
best and highest sense of the term ; a man who 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 167 

lives in the fear of God. But I should like to 
know the reason of your inquiry ?' * Sir/ 
she answered, ' I was the nurse that attended 
Voltaire in his last sickness, and for all the 
wealth of Europe I would never see another 
infidel die/ "* 

To a lady distressed with a dread of dying 
Voltaire once wrote: "All things considered, 
I am of opinion that one ought never to 
think of death. This thought is of no 
use whatever, save to embitter life. Death 
is a mere nothing. Those people who sol- 
emnly proclaim it are the enemies of the 
human race ; one must endeavor always to 
keep them off." 

Voltaire's physician left this testimony : " It 
was my lot that this man should die under my 
hands. . . . As soon as he saw that all the 
means he had employed to increase his strength 
had just the opposite effect, death was con- 
stantly before his eyes. From this moment 
madness took possession of his soul. Think of 
the ravings of Orestes. He expired under the 
torments of the Furies." 

It has become a familiar fact that General 
Ethan Allen, one of the bold skeptics of about 
a century ago, had a Christian wife. When 
his daughter, whom he idolized, came to die, 

* Ford's Damascus. 



1 68 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

turning to him her languid eyes, she asked, 
" Father, in whose faith would you have me 
die ? n He staggered a moment and replied, 
" In your mother's faith." Allen then spoke 
out of his deeper consciousness, beyond the 
realm of speculation and controversy. How 
many, in all ages, like the apostate Balaam, 
have exclaimed, " Let me die the death of the 
righteous, and let my last end be like his ! M 

A woman who had been a prominent lecturer 
on infidelity came to her dying pillow. Being 
much disturbed in her mind, her friends gath- 
ered around and exhorted her to " hold on to 
the last." " Yes," she replied, " I have no ob- 
jection to holding on ; but will you tell me what 
I am to hold on to ? " An infidel, standing by, 
was so affected that he renounced his infidelity. 
How many skeptics, finding nothing to hold 
on to, have turned to the Lord Jesus Christ ! 

A business man, when pressed by his pas- 
tor on the subject of personal religion, coldly 
replied, " I am interested in all religious mat- 
ters ; I have thought the matter over, and have 
come deliberately to the decision that I have 
no personal need of Jesus Christ, in the sense 
in which you preach." Just two weeks after 
he was taken suddenly and seriously ill. No 
one was permitted to speak to him until within 
an hour of death, when the sick man in a mel~ 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 69 

ancholy whisper exclaimed, " Who will carry 
me over the river ? " * 

When men come to die they feel the need 
of the divine Redeemer to bear them over the 
river, or as the Daysman to stand between 
them and the Most High, when they shall 
appear before the tribunal of heaven. 

A skeptic once said, " There is one thing that 
mars all the pleasures of my life." " What is 
that ? " inquired a friend. He responded, " I 
am afraid the Bible is true. If I could know 
for certain that death is an eternal sleep I 
should be happy ; but the fear that the Bible 
is true is the thorn that pierces my soul, for 
if the Bible is true I am lost forever/' 

In this discussion I am not at liberty to pro- 
duce witnesses from our side ; and yet I maybe 
allowed to throw in an inquiry, as a challenge. 

What do you think of the remark of Hannah 
More, that no one ever repented of Chris- 
tianity on his deathbed ? A fact which, she 
said, " offsets all the wit and argument of infi- 
delity." 

I throw out the challenge, who ever knew 
a Christian, on his deathbed, giving up Chris- 
tianity, and taking refuge in any form of infi- 
delity or philosophy or paganism? 

But is it objected that some skeptics persist 
* Rev. C. S. Robinson, D.D., in the Sunday School Times. 



170 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

in maintaining their views to the last and die 
calmly? Yes; and I have no disposition to 
disguise the fact. Let me cite the example of 
Rousseau. He died with a most impious ap- 
peal to the divine Being upon his lips. "Ah! 
my dear," he said, " how happy a thing it is to 
die when one has no reason for remorse or self- 
reproach ! " Then, addressing the Almighty, he 
said, " Eternal Being, the soul that I am going 
to give thee back is as pure at this moment as 
it was when it proceeded from thee ; make it a 
partaker of thy felicity." 

Do you ask how I account for such a 
death ? Look at his life, as related by him- 
self in his autobiography, and then you can 
account for it. 

Early in life he was apprenticed to an artist. 
During his apprenticeship he frequently stole 
from his master, as well as other persons. Be- 
fore his time expired he fled to Sardinia and 
turned Catholic. Then he became a footman, 
in which capacity he followed his old practice 
of stealing. Detected with stolen goods, he 
managed to have his theft charged upon a 
servant girl, and she was driven from her place 
in disgrace. His debaucheries were many and 
very disgusting, in which the most sacred re- 
lations of life were wantonly outraged. You 
could not endure their recital. At last he 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 171 

married, had a family of children, and for fear 
they should want after his death he sent them 
to the almshouse in his own lifetime. 

And yet this vile man, after such a life, had 
the hardihood to say, " No man can come to 
the throne of God and say, ' I am a better man 
than Rousseau/ " 

You do not wonder that a man so devoid of 
conscience should die such a death. May I not 
cite, as a universal fact, and a matter of com- 
mon acknowledgment, that there is a law of 
hardening, in both the material and the moral 
worlds ; and that in the moral realm the phe- 
nomena of this hardening are moral obtuseness, 
a paralysis of the moral feelings, a state whose 
very calmness is awful, fittingly described by 
St. Paul in those pregnant words, " past feel- 
ing?" 

Are not men often calm at death because 
they are in a drowsy, comatose state ? May 
not men be either physically or spiritually 
comatose, or both? Does mere calmness in 
death, then, meet the test ? What virtue can 
there be in dying stupidly, like the swine? 

Does some one cite the calm deaths of pagan 
devotees, the victims of the old funeral pyre 
and the Juggernaut ? But is there a spirit of 
triumph in their deaths ? Is there not a type 
of dying peculiar to Christianity, full of hope 



172 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

and ofttimes of holy triumph? Can you find it 
in connection with any other religion ? 

It is not stupid, but intelligent, farseeing, 
joyful. How unlike the death scenes of Hindu 
devotees, who, under the rigorous demands of 
a system they dare not resist, cast themselves 
into the Ganges, or in former days under the 
Juggernaut ! How unlike the Hindu widow, 
who, rather than endure a social ostracism that 
is worse than death, ascends the funeral pyre ! 
These devotees blindly devote themselves to 
death in the spirit of despair, not unlike the 
suicides we are familiar with. There is no 
moral grandeur in such deaths, no spiritual 
hope, no singing in triumph. Christianity is 
the only religion whose adherents triumph in 
death, singing, " I'll praise my Maker," etc. 

The spiritual attitude of a skeptic at death 
is an interesting study. Courtlandt Palmer, of 
New York city, well known as a radical skeptic, 
two days before death thus wrote to a friend : 
" I suffer no fear in the presence of what 
Christians call the King of Terrors." That is 
the whole of it, " no fear." There is no hope, 
no triumph, no victory. The bravest unbeliever 
dies with set teeth and clinched hands, daring 
the unknown. He has nothing to hope for. 
His best is extinction of being. 

How absurd for an intelligent being to die 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 73 

thus, in what may be characterized as an ab- 
normal or an excentric, if not a fungus, state ! 
Death is such a prodigious reality, so marked 
in human experience, that, as a matter of good 
taste merely, no man can decently pass through 
it Without being solemnly affected. A defiant, 
fearless attitude about the hereafter, if not 
sheer pretense, is at least in the highest degree 
irrational. What may be after death is too 
grave a matter to be dismissed with a sneer. 
Every soul wants an affirmative faith, such as 
many skeptics have confessed that Christianity 
imparts. 

Does some one say, the ecstasies and exhila- 
ration of dying Christians are often caused by 
stimulating medicines ? 

Do physicians have one medicine for Chris- 
tians and another for unbelievers ? If it is all 
in the medicine, why does not the medicine 
which you say produces exhilaration, joy, and 
spiritual triumph in Christians produce simi- 
lar experiences in unbelievers when they come 
to die ? If this is so, then some druggist, mak- 
ing a mistake, as they sometimes do, may put 
up the medicine intended for a dying Christian 
and send it to a dying skeptic, and we will have 
a blatant infidel in death singing, " Glory, Hal- 
lelujah ! " And all because the druggist made 

a mistake in putting up the medicine ! 
12 



174 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

Is not this a legitimate answer? I desire no 
ad captandum advantage. We are dealing with 
serious matters, and we want to know only the 
truth. 

Or, does some one say it is only a natural 
faith that sustains the Christian — the fact that 
he believes certain things in respect to the fu- 
ture makes them real to him, so that he launches 
off in death sustained by this assurance, and 
that this faith implies no supernatural ele- 
ment? And do you cite examples of great 
natural faith — Columbus's faith in the exist- 
ence of a western continent, sustaining when 
his companions on the voyage faltered and 
trembled ? And Napoleon Bonaparte's faith 
in his destiny, which kept him calm amid the 
terrible charges of the battlefield ? 

Is it, indeed, a merely natural faith that sus- 
tains the Christian ? Why, then, does not the 
infidel's faith, that there is no hereafter, sustain 
him and make him joyful and victorious in 
death? I will tell you. It makes all the dif- 
ference in the world what a man's faith takes 
hold upon. If it takes hold upon merely the 
shifting sands of conjecture, negation, and 
doubt, it is sure to fail, for it has no certitude. 
Negative theories cannot meet the needs of the 
soul. 

But the Christian's faith, even by the ad- 



VINDICATED BY ITS ENEMIES. 1 75 

mission of unbelievers, does sustain him, tak- 
ing hold upon something real, solid, and satis- 
fying. Thus has been conceded the last point 
in the argument, the vital point, demonstrat- 
ing that Christianity is neither a sham nor a 
delusion, but a glorious, living, eternal reality, 
the Rock of Ages. 



inferences. 



INFERENCES. 1 79 



CHAPTER VII. 

INFERENCES. 

From the foregoing acknowledgments it is 
evident: 

1. That man possesses a moral nature. 

2. That man's moral nature has its necessi- 
ties and its demands. 

3. The existence of a demand in any de- 
partment of nature implies the existence of a 
corresponding supply. 

4. But unbelief in none of its forms satisfies 
the needs of man's spiritual nature. 

5. The Christian religion, even our enemies 
being the judges, does meet these spiritual 
necessities. 

6. Only the Author of the human soul can 
know its constitution and its needs and pro- 
vide a satisfying supply. 

7. Hence the Author of nature and the Au- 
thor of Christianity are one and the same God. 

From the preceding discussion we see the 
weakness and folly of infidelity and the strength 
and blessedness of Christianity. 

We have no reason to be ashamed of Chris- 



180 CHRISTIANITY VINDICATED. 

tianity or to fear it will ever be superseded. 
A religion that so satisfies the human soul will 
always be in demand. 

A religion that confers such unspeakable 
blessings upon humanity is worth all the sacri- 
fices and efforts that can be put forth for its 
dissemination throughout the world. We have 
nothing too good to give to God for the up- 
building of his everlasting kingdom. 



INDEX. 



Abbot, F. E. (quoted), 13-23. 

Abraham, 54. 

Acknowledgments, 136, etc. 

Admissions, 9. 

Adrian, 42. 

Agnosticism inadequate, 147. 

Agnostics, 157, 158. 

Alcott, Dr., 92. 

Alexander the Great, 33. 

Allen, General Ethan, 167. 

Ambrose, 107. 

American Unitarian Associa- 
tion, 116, 121, 122. 

Andover Review, 138. 

Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 
66, 140. 

Apis, 54. 

Aquinas, 108. 

" Arcadia being judge," 9. 

Argument, novel form, 9. 

Arnold, Matthew, no, 137, 

147. 
Asseverations, empty, 14, etc. 
Association, British, 26. 
Association, Free Religious, 

115. 
Athanasius, 107. 
Atheism unsatisfactory, 24, 

165. 
Atheist, 152. 
Atheistic revolutions, 33. 
Atonement expiatory, 104-1 n. 
Author of Christianity, 179. 
of nature, 179. 



Bacchus, rites of, 56. 

Balaam, 168. 

Bangs, Brother & Co., 42, 56. 

Barmecide feast, 14. 

Bereavement, 145, 161. 

Berlin, 150. 

Bible and Diderot, 69. 

and Lord Chesterfield, 69. 

and Goethe, 67. 

and Huxley, 69. 

literary excellence of, 64. 

principles of, 28, 29. 

needed, 137. 

satisfies, 136. 

vindicated, 137. 
BienPublique (quoted), 29, etc. 
Bill, the, drawn up, 18, etc. 
Billings, Josh, 118. 
Blake, J. Vela (quoted), 15. 
Blank atheism, 24. 
Bodichou, 149. 
Bohn's Library, 55. 
Bolingbroke, Lord, 65. 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 51. 
Boston Lectures, 59. 
Boyle Lectures, 74, 136. 
British Association, 26. 
British Weekly \ no. 
Brugsch, 58. 
Buckley, Rev. James M., 

D.D.,LL.D., 153. 
Bunsen, 58. 
Burr, Aaron, 166. 
Business man, a, 168. 



1 82 



INDEX, 



Caesar, Julius, 51. 
Candor and unbelief, 8. 
Carlyle (quoted), 76, 136,137. 
Cato, 144. 

Causative power, 18. 
Celsus, 47, 48. 
Central column, 135-175. 
Chance, theory of, 24. 
Charming, Rev. W. E.,LL.D., 

119. 
Chapin, Rev. E. H., D.D., 

107. 
Chemical combination, 20. 
Cheney, Mrs. Ednah D., 68. 
Chesterfield, Lord (quoted), 

69. 

Chinese kings, 18. 
Choate, Hon. Rufus, 159. 
Cholera, origin of, 20. 
Christ and Socrates compared, 
86, etc. 
as God, worshiped, 42. 
deity of, testimonies of Rev. 
E. H. Sears, Rev. J. W. 
Thompson, D.D., Chris- 
tia?i Examiner, Rev. S. P. 
Putnam, D.D., 100-104. 
testimonies to, 28, 29, 65. 
testimony of Bolingbroke, 

65. 

J. Stuart Mill, 66. 

Tom Paine, 66. 

Rousseau, 67, etc. 

Ednah D. Cheney, 68. 

Mill, Spinoza, Schelling, 

Hegel, Strauss, Fichte, 

Richter, Kant, Renan, 

De Wette, 81-84. 

Christian Advocate (quoted), 

.153- 
Christian faith, 173. 
Christianity, a reforming 
power, 72, etc. 
corroborated, 8. 



Christianity, central column 
of, 135-175. 
divinity of, 81, etc. 
strength of, 175. 
testimonies to, by Gibbon, 
Lecky, Rousseau, Renan, 
Froude, Carlyle, Dar- 
win, 72-76. 
will live forever, 135, etc. 

Christians inconsistent, 70* 

Chronology, 15. 

Chrysostom, 107. 

Clement of Alexandria (quot- 
ed), 39, etc. 

Columbus's faith, 174. 

Comatose state, 171. 

Comte (quoted), 25, 147. 

Confessions, 15, 23. 

Confucius, 66. 

Congregationalist (quoted), 27. 

Conscience wanting, 33. 

Consciousness, 19. 

Contents, 5. 

Controversy, influence of, 8. 

Cosmos, 159. 

Counselors, 18. 

Country Parson (quoted), 15. 

Cromwell, 31. 

Crucial tests, 145. 

Cumulative argument, 3. 

Damascus, Ford's (quoted), 

167. 
Dante, 140. 
Danton (quoted), 32. 
Darwin, 19. 

Death hour, the, 158, 161. 
Death, reality of, 173. 
Decline and Fall of Roman 

Empire (quoted), 45. 
Delay, 22. 
Deleyre, 136. 
Demand and supply, 179. 
Demand for Christianity, 180. 



INDEX. 



I8 3 



Design, evidence of, 26. 
Desmoulins, Camille, 32. 
De Wette (quoted), 52, 59. 
Dewey, Rev. Orville, D.D., 

120, 121. 
Diderot's testimony, 69, 136. 
Discourse, a true, 48. 
Disguises, 17. 
Divinity of Christianity, 81, 

etc. 
Divisions of scientific men, 

17. 
Doctrines, four leading, 97, 

etc. 
Doubt about immortality, 26. 

how begotten, 18. 
Doubters, acknowledgments 

of, 8. 
Druggists make mistakes, 173. 
Dupanloup, Bishop, 156. 
Dying persons, 164, etc. 

Edwards, Rev. J., 108. 

Egypt, 53, etc. 

Eichhorn, 38. 

Ein Bekenntniss, 146. 

Eliot, George (quoted), 148. 

Eliot, Rev. W. G., D.D., 
LL.D., 120, 121, 126. 

Emerson, R. W., 19, 26. 

Umile (quoted), 50, 85. 

Enemies give proofs, 9. 

England in Eighteenth Cen- 
tury (quoted), 163. 

Epieikeia, 138. 

Essays on Religion (Mill, 
quoted), 49, 81. 

Ethical sense, the, 27. 

Ethics, 21. 

Euphemistic disguises, 7. 

Eupolemus, 56. 

European Morals, History of 
(quoted), 73, 143. 

Evangelical teacher, the, 162. 



Evolution, 27, 28. 

Ewald, 58. 

Examiner, Christian, 101, 

105, 125, 129. 
Excellence of Christianity, 64, 

etc. 
Experience, the term, 19. 
Experimental religion, 111- 

118. 

Faith promoted, 24. 

Faith, the sea of, 147. 

Fathers of the Church, 38. 

Fenelon, 108. 

Fiske, Prof. John (quoted), 
23, 27, 28. 

Flattery, influence of, 8. 

Flowers, 32. 

Folly of infidelity, 179. 

Ford's Damascus, 167. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 31, 39. 

Freedom, 19, 24, 26. 

French Academy, 155. 

French Directory, 149. 

French mind, the, 29, 30. 

French, the, a military peo- 
ple, 30. 

Froude's testimony to Chris- 
tianity, 76. 

Fungoid origin of cholera, 
20. 

Ganges, 172. 

Gesenius, 105. 

Gibbon, Edward (quoted), 44, 

etc., 72, etc. 
Gibson, Dr. (quoted), 157. 
Girondists, the, 32. 
God and immortality, 13-33. 
Goethe and the Bible, 67. 
Goodly temple, 64, etc. 
Gospel of John, 39. 
Greenacre Conference, the, 

27. 



1 84 



INDEX, 



Habakkuk (quoted), 64. 

Hamilton, Hon. A., 165. 

Hamilton, the philosopher, 26. 

Hamlet, 135. 

Harrison, Frederic, 27, 147. 

Hartmann, 24, 146. 

Heart, expression of, 8. 

Hecatseus, 53. 

Hedge, Rev. F. H., D.D., 

123, 129, 130. 
Hegelians, the, 166. 
Heine (quoted), 150, 151, 164, 

etc. 
Hennell, Miss, 148. 
Herford, Rev. Brooke, D.D., 

141. 
Hierocles, 47. 
Higginson, T. W. (quoted), 

115. 
Hindu devotees, 172. 
Historic basis, 37, etc. 
Hollis Street Church, 123. 
Holt, Henry, & Co., 49. 
Hope of unbelievers, 8. 
Horticultural Hall, 14, etc. 
Humanity needs religion, 136. 
Humboldt, 159. 
Huxley (quoted), 19, 69, 139, 

140. 
Hypotheses framed, 20. 

Ideal picture, an, 37, 63. 
"I'll praise my Maker" 

(quoted), 172. 
Illusion, an, 37. 
Imitation of Christ, 146. 
Immortality, 13-33. 
Index^ The (quoted), 13-23. 
Induction and deduction, 20, 

22. 
Inferences, 179. 
Infidelity, folly of, 179. 

source of, 7, 8. 

what it says, 44. 



Ingersoll, Robert G., 165. 
Intelligent Will, an, 25. 
Interlopers, 16. 
Inward sense, the, 137. 
Irenasus (quoted), 39, etc. 

Jefferson, Hon. Thomas, 39, 

68, 159. 
Jerome, 107. 

Jerusalem, the siege of, 46. 
John's gospel, 39. 
Joseph, 55. 
Judea, 46. 

Judges, outside of Bible, 9. 
Juggernaut, 172. 
Julian, 47, 57. 
Jury, 18. 

Justification by faith, 162. 
Justin, 54, 55. 
Juvenal, 56. 

Kant (quoted), 24-26. 

Kelvin, Lord, 26. 

King, Rev. T. Starr, 107, 116, 

117, 123. 
Kuntz (quoted), 24. 

La Manche, 31. 
Lamartine (quoted), 29-33. 
Lardner, 43. 

Last Essays of Arnold, 138. 
Lawyer's testimony, a, 113. 
Lecky (quoted), 73, etc., 76, 

91, 143,144, 161-163. 
Legouve, 154, 155. 
Leibnitz, 26. 
Leonidas, 87. 
Lepaux, 149. 
Lepsius, 58. 
Literature and Dogma, 137, 

138. 
Littre, 153-155. 
Locke, 26. 
Longinus, 56. 



INDEX. 



I8 5 



Lucan, 144. 

Luke xxi, 20, 21 (quoted), 46. 

Luther, 108. 

Lysimachus, 54. 

Magazine, Monthly Religious, 

100-104, no, III. 
Manetho, 54. 
Marseillaise, the, 32. 
Martyr, Justin, 40. 
Mason, Hon. Jeremiah, 159. 
Mason, Rev. J. M., D.D., 

70. 
Materialism, 23, etc. 
Medicine, 173. 
Melmoth, Mr. (quoted), 43. 
Methodists, the, 163. 
Mhegard, 150. 
Mill, J. Stuart, 19, 49, 66, 81, 

etc., 91, etc. 
Milton's Satan, 130. 
Mirabeau (quoted), 32. 
Misfortunes, 145. 
Missions, Darwin's testimony 

to, 76, 77. 
Mists clearing up, 37. 
Moabite Stone, the, 60. 
Monuments, 59, etc. 
Moral law, 27. 
Moral nature, 7, 179. 
Moral sentiment, 19. 
More, Miss Hannah, 169. 
Moses, 53-57. 
Murphy's Tacitus, 42, 56. 
Music Hall lecture, 26. 
Mystical theory, 37, etc. 

Napoleon's faith, 174. 
Nationel, the, 156. 
Nature, unity of, 19. 
Needs of the soul, 160. 
Negative theories, 174. 
Nepos, Cornelius, 54. 
Nero, 42, 43. 



New Testament (quoted), 39, 

etc. 
Nicholas of Damascus, 56. 
North American Review 

(quoted), 23, 160. 
Numenius, 57. 

Oberlin, 108. 

Old Testament, 52, etc. 

Old truths established, 24. 

41 One Absolute Subject," 24. 

Ordeal, the supreme, 145. 

Orestes, 167. 

Origen, 48. 

Pagan devotees, 171. 
Paine, Thomas, 65, 165. 
Palmer, Courtlandt, 172. 
Pan's contest, 9. 
Pantheism, decline of, 24. 
Papias, 40. 
Parker, Theodore, 124, 141, 

142. 
" Past feeling," 1 71. 
Pentateuch, 52, 53, 57. 
Perversity of human nature, 7. 
Phantasm, a, in. 
Pharaohs, 18. 
Philosophical opposers, early, 

47-49. 
Philosophy, consolations of, 

148. 
Photosphere, the, 20. 
Physical science begets doubt, 

18. 
Plato, 51, 143. 
Pliny the younger (quoted), 

41, etc. 
Polemon, 54. 

Polycarp (quoted), 39, etc. 
Pontius Pilate, 43. 
Popular Science Monthly, 26. 
Porphyry, 47, 57. 
Positive evidence omitted, 38. 



1 86 



INDEX, 



Practical reason, 24. 
Problems, the highest, 17. 
Protestantism, the glory of, 

162. 
Psalms, the, 52. 
Psychology, 21. 
Punishment, future, 118-131. 

Rameses II, 58. 
Rationalists testify, 38. 
Rawlinson, 53, 54, 56. 
Reade, Charles, and the Bible, 

138, 139. 

Reason, the practical, 24. 

Reforming power of Chris- 
tianity, 72, etc. 

Religion, comparative, 17. 

Religious sense, the, 27. 

Renan's testimony, 68, 75, 
etc., 88, etc., 92, 115,116, 
158. 

Republic without God, 33. 

Restorationism, 122, etc. 

Retribution, 118, etc. 

Revelation intuitional, 16. 
necessary, 29. 
written, 16. 

Reverse tendencies, 24. 

Ristori, 155. 

Robinson, Rev. C. S., D.D., 
169. 

Rock of Ages, 175. 

Roland, Madame, 32. 

Roman Catholicism, 162. 

Rome, burning of, 43. 

Rouge, 58. 

Rousseau's death, 170, 171. 
testimony, 50, 67, 74, 85, 
etc., 92, 136. 

Sabbath, the, 56. 
Sacerdotal claims, 162. 
Sacred writings, the study of, 
19. 



Sacrifices rewarded, 180. 

Salisbury, the Marquis of, 26. 

Satan, Milton's, 130. 

Schelling (quoted), 89. 

Schiller (quoted), 130. 

Schopenhauer, 146. 

Science, attitude of, toward 
God, 16. 
infancy of, 17. 
of religion, 17. 

Scientific theism, 24. 

thought, the trend of, 13, 
etc. 

Scriptures, majesty of the, 85, 
etc. 

Self-sacrifice, 74. 

Sense, the ethical, 27. 

Sentiment, the moral, 19. 

Sidney (quoted), 31. 

Skeptics, the words of, 8, etc. 

Sociology, 21. 

Socrates and Jesus compared, 
86, etc. 

Soul-satisfying power of Chris- 
tianity, 135, etc. 

Spencer, Herbert, 19, 25, 147. 

Spinoza's testimony, 82. 

Spiritual needs met, 179. 

Stoics, the, 143. 

Strauss, Dr., 38, 146, 156. 

Stupidity in death, 171. 

Suetonius, 42. 

Sunday School Times (quoted), 
169. 

Sure refuge, 8. 

Tacit admissions, 159, etc. 
Tacitus, 42-44, 46, 51, 56. 
Talleyrand, 149, 150. 
Tasso, 140. 

Tertullian (quoted), 39, etc. 
Testimonies to Bible, 70, 71. 
Theism, scientific, 24. 
Theophilanthropy, 149. 



INDEX. 



I8 7 



Thompson, Alexander, M.D., 

42. 
Thoreau (quoted), 146. 
Thucydides, 51. 
Tiberius, 43. 
Titus, 46. 

Totality of phenomena, 21. 
Transcendentalism, 20. 
Trojan war, 57. 
Truths, the old, 24. 
Tyndall, Prof, (quoted), 25. 
Tyng, Rev. Dr. (quoted), 

152, 153. 

Unbelief unsatisfying, 179. 
Unity of nature, 19. 
"Unknowable, The," 147. 
11 Unknown Cause, The," 

25. 
Usher's chronology, 15. 



Virgil (quoted), 9. 
Voltaire (quoted), 74, 88, 165. 
death of, 166, 167. 

Washington, George, 31, 166. 
Watson, Rev. John, no. 
Webster, Hon. Daniel, 64, 

159. 
Wesley (quoted), 161, 163. 
Westminster Review, 146. 
Wetherbee, C. H., 139. 
"When I survey the won- 
drous cross," no. 
Whitefield, 161. 
Witnesses not ready, 21. 

"Youthful figure of Science," 
the, 14. 

Zoological speculations, 26. 



THE END, 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



£r t> 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




